


The Dark Cybermen

by BleedingInk



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Supernatural
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-01-01 07:11:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 24,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1041899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingInk/pseuds/BleedingInk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermione Granger is traveling across the United States right after finishing her superior studies. One night, at a bar, she meets a handsome, charming guy called Dean Winchester, and the two hit it off rather nicely... until an awful silver robot blows the bar up and interrupts their evening.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Meeting New Friends

The girl had been playing with a piece of parchment for the last half hour. She twiddled it between her fingers, squeezed it in her hand, put it away on her bag only to take it out again, and reread it like she still couldn't believe whatever it was that it was written in it.

The bar she had chosen, right outside of town, was only mildly decent, no loud music, no drunk men playing pool. Just a rather cheerful crowd of people her age doing drinking games, talking and flirting. She supposed she ought to be having fun, but she couldn't get the words on the parchment out of her head...

"Well, this is a rather lonely corner," a gruff voice interrupted her thoughts. When she looked up, she met a couple of bright green eyes and a confident smile. "Hello," the boy said.

"Hi," she answered, smiling rather nervously. She had discovered American boys were much more straightforward, and she couldn't help but to feel a little intimidated sometimes.

"Can I ask you what's a girl like you doing in a place like this or are you sick of that line already?"

The girl laughed openly. She had, in fact, heard that line more times than she cared to count since she arrived at the States. Just because

"Oh, I just wanted somewhere quiet to think…” she said, and just in that moment, a girl decided it would be a good idea to ditch her heels and start dancing on the table.

“Well, you may wanna examine your definition of ‘quiet’”, the green-eyes boy said, and she nodded in agreement, amused despite everything. “I’m Dean, by the way,” he said, while stretching a hand towards her.

“Hermione,” she said, shaking it. A second too late, she thought maybe she shouldn’t have used her real name, but the boy didn’t react in any particular way.

“Nice to meet you, Hermione,” said Dean. “That’s a cool name.”

“Thank you,” she said, unconsciously fidgeting with her hair.

“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked.

There it was: the straightforwardness. Dean seemed like a decent enough guy, but she didn’t want to give the wrong impression. Then the words in the piece of parchment came rushing back to her mind, and she thought, well, one beer wouldn’t hurt anybody.

“Sure, why not?” she said, with a smile. “I’m on holiday.”

“That’s the spirit,” Dean said, and sat down in front of her before gesturing towards the waitress.

Hermione hadn’t been in the muggle world quite this much in a long time, and she was obviously out of practice, because she wasn’t sure what to tell Dean other than she had just finished all her superior studies and was taking a long trip across the States before starting working.

That was okay, though, because Dean talked a lot: about his brother, about his dad, about a concert he had been at the previous week. He was twenty, a year older than Hermione, but he was already working in what he called “the family business”, which apparently was some sort of pest control thing; Dean was sort of vague about it and the witch didn’t quite get it all. He was on a road trip too, taking a break between gigs, and offered Hermione a ride if she wanted to get anywhere.

“Thank you,” said Hermione. “But I have pretty much everything planned.”

Dean shrugged, obviously not offended at all. “So, what part of England are you from?”

“I’m currently living in London,” said Hermione, cautiously.

“Oh, great city.”

“Ever been?”

“Oh, no, no, I’ve heard!” Dean laughed, while shaking his head. “Never been anywhere I couldn’t get on two legs and four wheels.”

“Not a fan of flying?” Hermione asked, and couldn’t help but to chuckle at Dean’s terrified expression. “My friend Harry is a great flyer…”

“Flyer?” repeated Dean, confused. “Is that like… brit slang for pilot?”

“Yes… yes, you could say so,” Hermione replied, hurriedly, and put the rest of her beer aside. What was wrong with her? She couldn’t go around making that sort of comments!

Dean let it go, and continued talking and talking: about his music, his car, the coolest places he had been and that Hermione should totally visit if she could squeeze them in her plan. He had been around a lot, apparently, and had a lot of stories and anecdotes to tell. Hermione caught herself enjoying the conversation (which had degenerated into a monologue, but she didn’t mind that), and wondering what was she worried about. It wasn’t like show couldn’t make new friends on the way, right? That’s why she was on this holiday: meet new people, see new places. The words on the parchment had been completely forgotten around the second beer.

She wouldn’t have realized it was two o’clock in the morning unless the bartender hadn’t flashed the lights. The party people had long since gone, and Dean and Hermione were the only clients left.

“God, is it that late?” Dean asked, checking his clock. He sounded disappointed. He paid for all the drinks (even though Hermione protested they should split it), and walked Hermione to the door. “Where are you staying?” he asked.

“Charlottesville,” said Hermione. It wasn’t exactly there, but a charming magical community nearby, much like Hogsmeade, that came highly recommended by _101 Magical Locations in America to Visit Before You Die._

“You’re far away,” said Dean, frowning. “Let me give you a ride.”

“Oh, no, please, it’s not necessary…” said the witch, weakly. She had thought of just apparating there, but she couldn’t explain that to Dean. Besides, she was a little bit drunk, and unsure of how her abilities might be impaired by that.

“Come on, with my Baby, we’ll be there in ten minutes,” said Dean, gesturing towards his car.

Hermione stopped a minute to consider it. She took a good look at Dean’s confident smile, and the way his face was covered by freckles, and suddenly, she was reminded of another set of freckles she should have been thinking about all along.

“You’re very kind, Dean,” she said, with a slight sense of guilt clutching in her stomach. “But… uhm, I’ll just… take a cab or something.”

“Not getting into cars with strangers. Got it,” he said. His smile didn’t decay. “I’m gonna be honest with you: I approached you in the hopes you’d go back to my motel with me, but I realized halfway there that you’re too smart and sophisticated for that.”

Hermione was a little taken aback by that confession. She wondered what she could have possibly said to make Dean think she was sophisticated. And in fact, she didn’t feel particularly smart that night.

“I… I have a boyfriend,” she excused herself, still baffled.

“Lucky guy,” Dean said, shrugging again. “Well, then, if you’re sure… I guess this is goodbye.”

He stretched his hand once again, and Hermione took it. Despite everything, she didn’t regret meeting Dean. He was a good guy.

“Thank you for the company,” she said, hoping that would express what she was thinking.

“Enjoy the rest of your trip,” he answered, and really there was nothing left for them to say.

“You can let go of my hand now,” Hermione said, and Dean chuckled, obviously a little embarrassed. He turned around to go back to his car…

… there was a thunderous noise, and the next thing Hermione knew was that she was lying with her face down in the pavement, covered in dust, and with a dull pain in the hand she had used to stop her falling. A few steps forward, Dean was swearing under his breath and standing up fast. He grabbed her by the elbow and gently helped her back on her feet. He asked something, but Hermione’s ears were ringing.

“What?!” she shouted, and the ringing became louder.

“Are you okay?!” Dean asked, shouting as well. He was temporarily deaf too.

“Yes… I think,” said Hermione. “What the hell…?”

She didn’t finish her question when she realized two things: Dean had a gun in his other hand, and the bar had disappeared. Instead, there was a huge crater with a pile of debris lying around, and only two walks standing. The bartender was nowhere to be seen.

“Stay behind,” Dean said, taking a couple of steps towards the debris. It was a good thing he wasn’t exactly paying attention to her, because Hermione had taken out her wand almost by reflect, although she wasn’t sure what she could do to help. Shouldn’t they be calling Emergency? Was she authorized to use magic? She knew she had permission for minor spells, but…

Something moved in the shadows, and she froze. Dean raised his gun towards the tall figure approaching them.

“Who are you?” he demanded. The figure came closer, and Hermione was dumbstruck: standing right in front of them, there was an enormous tin man; with big, empty eye sockets and a mouth that was nothing but a straight line. It was even taller than Dean, and each one of his movements was accompanied by a metallic sound.

“YOU WILL BE UPGRADED!” said the robot, taking a step towards them.

“Stay where you are!” Dean warned him, but the robot merely took another step towards them.

“YOU WILL BECOME LIKE US!” it replied, in a monotonous tone.

Dean shot it, and Hermione barely had time to be deafened again before she realized it was useless: the bullet just ricocheted against the silver skin of the robot, and fell to the ground without leaving so much as a scratch in it.

“YOU WILL BE UPGRADED!” the robot repeated, and started marching towards them at a steady rhythm. “YOU WILL BECOME LIKE US!”

Hermione did the only logical thing: she pointed her wand at the wall next to the robot and cried “BOMBARDA MAXIMA!”

The wall next to the robot came crashing down on top of it. Hermione caught a glimpse of him raising his arms to try and stop it before Dean grabbed her elbow again and pulled her towards his car. This time she didn’t hesitate: she barely had time to close the door before the car started, and with a screeching noise, they left the parking lot at full speed.

“How did you do that?!” Dean shouted.

“Why do you have a gun?!” Hermione answered.

“What is that stick?!” Dean asked.

“Why are you going so fast?!” Hermione screamed after looking at the speedometer. “Slow down!”

“Not until you give me some answers!”

“Excuse me,” said a voice in the backseat. “But I don’t think that’s a nice way to treat your friend.”

Dean stomped on the brakes so fast Hermione was sure the car would make a violent overturn.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked, staring at the man in the backseat with a mix of confusion and anger that would have been almost comical if Hermione had felt like laughing. “And how did you get in my car?”

“Hello,” said the man, adjusting his bow tie and smiling despite Dean’s obvious murderous desires. “Nice to meet you, I’m the Doctor!”

“Doctor?” Hermione repeated. “Doctor who?”

“Yes, exactly!” the man said, cheerfully.

And here Hermione was thinking the night couldn’t get any weirder.


	2. Will you STOP beeping at my Baby?

This was definitely not Dean’s night.

First it turned out the pretty brit chick he had flirted with was some kind of creature who could blow things up with a stick.

Then, a freaky robot thing came out of nowhere and tried to kill them (“upgraded” his ass, Dean Winchester knew when something was trying to murder him).

And now this guy, who claimed to be a doctor of some kind and apparently completely lacked the ability to stand still, was pointing at his Baby with another weird stick with a glowing end.

“Could you stop beeping at my car?” Dean asked, irritated, after the guy had run around it at least twice.

“Chevrolet Impala, 1967, four doors,” said the guy, and Dean was surprised that he had gotten it right. “She is a beauty, by the way.”

“Why, thank you, I wax her twice a week,” said Dean, palming his car on the hood, proudly. Then he realized his tone had softened. “Now can you tell me who the hell are you?” he asked, in what he hoped was a threatening groan.

“I already have,” said the guy, still running around like he was looking for something he had lost in the ground. “If you didn’t hear me it’s your own fault for not paying attention. People are always paying attention to the wrong thing, if you ask me. You need to learn to eliminate the distractions and focus on the really important things, like, not who I am, but when am I?” the guy stopped his ramble, and stare at Dean and Hermione with a wide smile, like he really expected them to answer something to all that nonsense. “No, really, what year is it?” he asked, when it was obvious neither of them was going to say anything.

Dean had no idea what the hell the guy was talking about, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t completely right in the head. He turned to Hermione, who, whatever she was, at least seemed sane.

“It’s 1999,” she said. She, too, was eyeing at Bow Tie Guy like she didn’t know if she should run away from him or shoot him with her stick.

“1999! Lovely year, turn of the millennia, enchanting fireworks all around the world!” the Doctor said, clapping his hands enthusiastically. “Yes, I have a wonderful idea! We could all go watch the fireworks together!”

“Well… it’s still June,” Hermione said, carefully. “I don’t know if there’s going to be fireworks anywhere…”

“June? Blimey, I’ve come too early,” the Doctor said; his eyes shooting wide open in surprise. “That would be a first one…”

“I’m sorry,” said Hermione. “I… I have to ask… are you a wizard?”

“No, no, I’m not,” the Doctor said, and took Hermione’s hand, where she still had the make-things-explode thingy. “But judging by your wand, I would say you are. Well, a witch. Hogwarts graduate?”

“How do you know about Hogwarts?” asked Hermione, obviously baffled.

“I know about everywhere!” the Doctor stated, proudly. “Beautiful place, Hogwarts. Haven’t visited it in a while, since that awful Vashta Nerada infection. How’s dear old Irma?”

“What the hell is a Vashta Nerada?” asked Dean, and then, “Wait, you’re a witch?”

Hermione looked at him like she couldn’t believe he was asking such a thing. “You have a gun!” she accused him.

“Yeah, with silver bullets to defend myself of things like vampires and werewolves!” said Dean. “I’m a hunter, it’s what I do! I kill things like that!”

“That’s the stupidest and most offensive thing I’ve ever heard!” said Hermione, irritated. “And I would have you know one of the bravest men I’ve met happened to be a werewolf.”

“Yeah, well, I would have you know this one girl I was crushing on happened to be a witch,” said Dean bitterly. “And she had a boyfriend on top of it.”

“I’m sorry to bother you," said the Doctor, and completely ignored the glares both Dean and Hermione shot at him. “You guys obviously have some issues to resolve, so if any of you can tell me if you’ve seen a big blue box, I’ll get out of your hair so you can keep on with your yelling.”

And then he beamed at them like it was the most logical thing to interrupt them and ask such a question. Dean rubbed his eyes, because there was a bad headache growing in the back of his head.

“What blue box?” asked Hermione, squinting her eyes.

“Well, it’s a box, and it’s blue,” the Doctor explained, like it was obvious. “Have you seen anything like that?”

“Wait, like… like a phone box?” Dean asked, suddenly remembering something he had seen that morning. “There was one right around my motel this morning.”

“Ah, yes, so that’s where I left it!” the Doctor hit his forehead. “Alright then, on our way!” he said, and tried to reach for the handle, but Dean put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back.

“Dude, no,” he stopped him. “You’re not getting into my car just like that!”

“Why not?” the Doctor asked, and seemed genuinely hurt.

“Because I don’t know who you are,” Dean said.

“Well, that’s very easy solvable, then,” said the Doctor, recovering his merry demeanor. “I will tell you everything while you drive me there. On we go then!”

And just like that, he slipped off Dean’s grip and climbed on the passenger seat. Dean looked at Hermione, because between that weird guy, and a witch he’d just met, he’d take the witch any day. But Hermione seemed like she wanted nothing to do with either of them.

“You know what? I’m just… I’m just gonna… go,” she said, shaking her head slightly.

Dean tried to protest (the night was dark, there were weirdos like the Doctor and that robot running around, he really didn’t mean that thing about werewolves) but before he could form and articulated sentence, there was a loud “POP!” and Hermione was no longer there. Right. Witch.

He took a deep breath and went back into the car, where the Doctor had took out the glowing stick and was pointing it at the stereo.

“Stop that!” said Dean.

“A bit on edge, aren’t we?” the Doctor said and, Dean swore on everything he hold dear, the bastard rolled his eyes at him.

“I wouldn’t be if you’d stop that… that… beeping,” Dean replied, starting the engine. “And you still haven’t explained how you got here in the first place!”

“Right, I had a bit of a rough landing,” the Doctor said. “I ought have hit my head, because I was a little… confounded when I came out, and then I stumbled into this gorgeous car, and I thought to myself ‘Well, that backseat seems like a really comfortable place to take a nap’, so I got in and did exactly that. And it certainly worked wonders, because… shouldn’t you… be looking at the road?”

Dean made a conscious effort to unstick his eyes from the Doctor.

“But I locked it before I left,” he said. That lunatic better not had forced his Baby open, because if so, he was kicking him out right there.

“Sonic screwdriver,” the Doctor said, proudly raising the glowing stick. “Really useful at this sort of things.”

“Okay. I’m going to stop asking questions now,” Dean decided, and turned on the radio. “And you’re lucky it’s my free night and I’m convinced you’re high on something, because any other moment, I would have shot you just for pulling a stunt like that.”

That had the desired effect, because the Doctor stared at him like he was slightly scared, and remained silent, for at least two minutes, before he started shifting in the seat, tapping his fingers on the vent, and rolling the window up and down over and over again. The fact that the Doctor didn’t actually get shot in the face was a testament to Dean’s patience, who managed to keep both hands firmly clutched on the wheel for the entire fifteen minutes ride until he parked in the corner where the big blue phone box sat.

“Okay, here we are,” Dean groaned. “Get out of my car.”

“Gladly. You’re not a very nice person, you know?” the Doctor said, but Dean was beyond the point of caring. He just wanted to go back to his room and crash for the next three or four hours. Hell, he might even get five, for a change, before he started to investigate the robot thing that had attacked him.

The Doctor walked towards the blue box, and hopped inside. Dean stopped to adjust the rearview mirror (which the Doctor had somehow managed to misplace) when a strange noise distracted him. It was a repetitive, whoosing sound that kind of reminded him of some undersea creature choking.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he muttered at himself when he looked up. The blue phone box was slowly becoming more and more transparent until, a few seconds later; it disappeared completely, taking his annoying occupant away with it.

Six hours, Dean decided. He deserved six freaking hours tonight.


	3. When in doubt, research.

A rhythmic tapping on the glass woke her up. Hermione opened her eyes and rubbed her face a couple of times before getting up to open the window for the owl standing on the ledge with a judging look on its face. It flew away as soon as Hermione took the envelope, and the young witch had to blink a couple of time to focus on the tiny handwriting she recognized immediately: it was Ginny’s.

She didn’t have to read the letter to know what it said: everybody was fine; Harry was probably doing something great in the Ministry, they hoped she was enjoying her holidays, and they missed her lots. Hermione felt like she had read the same message over and over since the beginning of her holidays, and was frankly a little jaded, but she still would write back telling Ginny all about the great time she was having, the interesting people she was meeting…

And with that thought, all the events of the previous night came rushing back to her.

Dean. The bar. The robot.

The Doctor.

Hermione stumbled downstairs. The inn’s canteen was almost empty at that hour, since it was way too early. She asked for some coffee at the counter (she would’ve preferred tea, but she had come to the conclusion it was better to wait until she was back in the UK to get a strong cup), and sat on a table in a corner where she knew she wouldn’t be bothered with a bunch of newspapers.

Unlike the wizard community back at home, the American wizards had three newspapers that almost always delivered the same news in varying sensationalist ways. Hermione hastily read all three of them, and found no mention of the silver robots, nor of the bar she’d been at the previous night. She supposed since it had been a muggle incident and the muggle police would be taking care of it, it wouldn’t show up there, but still.

The events kept going on and on inside her mind.

First, Dean, the hunter. He was most certainly non-magical, but he knew of the existence of werewolves and vampires. She wondered if the local Ministry was aware of the activities of Dean’s kind, and why hadn’t they stopped them.

Then, the big silver robot that showed up at the bar. Her skin crawled just to think about it, its menacing height and its empty glare. She wasn’t sure her spell had destroyed it, and if there was more like it, but if there were, it was certain to become a problem.

And there was the funny man in the bow tie asking questions about fireworks and blue boxes. Hermione just couldn’t shake the feeling it was all connected somehow. If she was able to find him, maybe he’d explain where that thing had come from.

“Excuse me,” she asked a waitress that was making the rounds on the tables offering more coffee. “Do you know where I can find some… information?”

“Information of what sort, miss?” the waitress asked kindly. “If you’d like to know about the sightseeing flying routes and the magical monuments, we have some useful pamphlets…”

“Oh, no, no,” Hermione shook her head, and upon seeing the upset expression of the waitress for rejecting her help, she specified: “I need information about a… a wizard.”

She hesitated to call the Doctor that, but what else could he be? Acting so strangely and being on first name basis with Hogwart’s librarian, he ought to be.

“Well,” the waitress said, tapping her manicured fingers against her chin. “You could go to the library, I suppose.”

Those words worked on Hermione like a Cheering Charm. Yes, she could definitely do that. When she’d had to confront things far worse, books had always been there to provide the answer she was seeking. She didn’t see any reason why it would be different this time around.

 

* * *

 

A little over an hour later, Hermione was showing her wand to the witch at the library’s counter. She analyzed it closely, then nodded approvingly and handed it back to Hermione along with a visitor’s pass.

“We have the biggest collection of books about magic in America,” she told her, pushing her glasses up her nose while opening the hidden door that led to the Washington State Library Very Special Section. “Don’t let the wizards from the New York Public Library tell you otherwise.”

Hermione took a look at the staggering piles and piles of books in front of her, and assured her guide she wouldn’t dare. The witch seemed pleased with her answer.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, dearie,” the witch told her with a benevolent smile. “I’m here to help.”

Hermione thanked her, and started making her way around the shelves. There were some young witches and wizards with books opened in front of them, taking notes and barely moving their lips, memorizing spells. Hermione found a couple of books called _Famous Healers from around the World_ and _Modern Magical Medicine_ , sat next to a wizard with a long black beard and a violet robe who was writing in a piece of parchment, and started turning the pages.

Ten minutes in, she realized it would have been a lot easier if she knew what she was looking for. She had practically nothing to go on with, except the vague title and the eccentric behavior. But that description fit half of the wizards in the books, and none of them matched the Doctor’s description. In a more desperate attempt, Hermione widened her search to alchemists and inventors as well, and started going backwards in the historical books. The Doctor couldn’t be that old, though, could he? But there were spells for that, so maybe his youthful appearance was just that, an appearance. Maybe he wasn’t famous, although by the way he introduced himself, it was almost like he expected them to know who he was, and…

_… a blue box drawing was repeatedly found in his journal…_

Hermione’s eyes stopped. She hadn’t even been paying attention to what she was reading, so she had to start the paragraph over. Somehow, she had ending reading the biography of Libatius Cornwall, a late seventeenth century Scottish wizard whose experiments with time magic led to the creation of the Time Turners. Even back then, Cornwall and his assistants hadn’t managed to move more than a few hours at a time, but Cornwall insisted there had to be a spell that allowed the traveler to go further backwards and even forwards. He worked on it most of life, and upon his death following an explosion in his laboratory, most of his research had ended in the hands of the British Department of Mysteries, who kept investigating up until the events that caused the disappearance of Eloise Mintumble in 1899.

Cornwall kept a lot of diaries describing his life and his works, and in them, there were constant mentions of a man with a “colorful scarf that was impractically long” and his “square blue box.” The encounter with this man during his stroll on a peaceful June afternoon was apparently what inspired Cornwall to begin his experiments with time magic in the first place.

Hermione bit her thumbnail for a moment. Well, it wasn’t quite the break she had been searching for, but it was more than she had found in all afternoon. She stood up (the place was completely empty now, and the wizard with the violet robe had long since left) and walked to the Library’s reception. The kind witch that had admitted her was still behind the counter, busying herself with a pair of knitting needles and a ball of wool.

“Did you find what you were looking for, dearie?” she asked.

“I think I’m off to a good start,” Hermione said. “Tell me, do you happen to have books about Libatious Cornwall?”

Something flashed behind the librarian’s glasses. Her shoulders tensed and her smile faltered just a little bit. It was so fast; Hermione figured she must have imagined it. A second later, the woman was back to her pleasant demeanor.

“Why, I think we might,” she said, putting the knitting needles aside and standing up. “Please, follow me.”

The witch guided her further and further among the shelves, up until the point where Hermione lost sight of anyone in the reading room. The books also became larger, and Hermione sneezed from all the dust gathered around. It was like nobody had reached that part of the library in decades.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you sure we are in the right place?”

The librarian turned to Hermione. No, she didn’t just _turn_. It was more like she gyrated her head over her shoulders in a very slowly, very mechanical manner. Her eyes were empty, and Hermione took a step backwards, reaching for her wand inside her sleeve.

“What are you?” Hermione asked, weakly.

“YOU MUST BE DELETED,” the witch said, in a hollow voice that sounded nothing like hers. Her head twitched, and her glasses fell on the floor as a silver device started to appear on the side of her face. “YOU MUST BE DELETED.”

“Stay back!” Hermione ordered, raising her wand. “I’m warning you!”

“YOU MUST BE DELETED,” the librarian repeated, and took a step towards Hermione, crushing her glasses with her heel. “YOU MUST BE DELETED…”

Hermione stopped vacillating. She pointed her wand at the shelves, and cast a Blasting Curse, prompting them to fall on top of the librarian. She didn’t wait to see if she had hit her; she turned around and ran from the door as fast as she could. She bolted out of the Very Special Section, only to crash directly into the wizard with the violet robe, with the same silver device attached to the side of his face.

“YOU MUST BE DELETED,” the man said in the same repetitive tone as the librarian, while Hermione struggled in his arms. “YOU MUST BE…”

There was a sizzling sound and the silver device let out some sparkles and smoke. The wizard stopped all his movements at once, and Hermione slipped from his grip and reached for her wand. When she raised her eyes, she saw her captor collapsing heavily on the floor. The Doctor was standing right behind him, toying with a small stick that was too short and too… technological to be a wand.

“No need to thank me,” he smirked.

Hermione opened her mouth to answer something, but then the door to the Very Special Section blew out of its hinges and flew across the room, knocking the Doctor down. The librarian’s head was spinning on her neck, searching for Hermione, but this time, she was prepared. She pointed her wand at the librarian’s face and shouted: “ _DIFFINDO!_ ”

The silver device was torn from the librarian’s face and fell on the floor, shattering into small pieces. The false librarian fell on the floor, like a puppet that just had its strings all cut. Hermione then pointed to the door on top of the Doctor and moved it aside with a flick of her wrist.

“No need to thank me,” she said, as she helped the Doctor back to his feet.

“Right,” the Doctor slurred, and touched his head as if to check everything was in place. “That was rather brilliant, what you did there. Most people would have panicked.”

“Well, I’ve been in worse situations,” Hermione shrugged. She didn’t mean to be humble or modest; she was simply stating a fact. The Doctor finished feeling his head and turned to her. His eyes and mouth opened wide, and he blinked several times.

“No!” he said. “You’re _her_! How did I not see it before? Hello, nice to meet you!” he exclaimed, as he grabbed Hermione’s free hand and shook enthusiastically. “It’s such an honor!”

Hermione blushed and delicately took a step backwards. Wizards were always effusive upon meeting her, Ron would’ve said she should have been used to it by now…

“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “You must have me confused with someone else…”

“Hermione Granger, brightest witch of your generation,” the Doctor said, like it was nothing. “Hero of the Second Wizarding War, and seventy-seventh Minister for Magic…”

“What?” Hermione asked.

“Well, not _yet_ , of course,” the Doctor shrugged. “But I’ll tell you what: some decades from now, I’m going to visit you in your office so we can have a nice cup of tea and I can say _‘I told you so’_. I love saying that.”

“Okay…” Hermione took another step backwards. Obviously, the Doctor was not a very stable person. “I’m going to… I should go, somebody should report this…”

“Oh, no! I forgot!” the Doctor hit his forehead with an open hand, and then grabbed Hermione by the shoulder. “The cybermen! A whole horde of them, coming this way! You can’t just go!”

“What?!” Hermione repeated, in higher pitch this time.

“Come with me!” the Doctor said, grabbing Hermione by the hand and leading her towards the library’s entry.

Parked right at the door, there was a blue phone box Hermione could have sworn wasn’t there when she arrived that morning.

“But what…? Doctor! You can possibly expect us to hide in there!” she said, but the Doctor was already snapping his fingers. The phone box’s doors opened, welcoming them, and the Doctor jumped inside without waiting for Hermione.

The witch hesitated just a moment longer, but if what the Doctor had said was true, what choice did she have? She just hoped there was enough room for both of them in there. After a taking a deep breath, she stepped in, and the doors closed behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took forever to update, I promise the next chapters won't take as long.
> 
> Libatius Cornwall is an invention of mine, but Eloise Mintumble is Rowling's.


	4. I'll Be Damn

Dean’s breathing was becoming shallower. His hands were gripped over the gun so tightly his knuckles were hurting. He heard coming behind him, and in one swift move, he jumped from his hiding spot and shouted: “Freeze!”

To his surprise, the person coming his way actually froze.

“Dean?” she asked, in a confused voice.

Dean lowered his gun. “Hermione?”

“What happened here?” she asked.

Dean blinked, and looked at the destroyed buildings, the empty streets and the cracked pavement.

“You mean after those silver bastards ran over this place and all hell broke loose?” he asked, sarcastically. “Well, you know, not much…”

“No,” Hermione seemed dumbfounded, watching the debris with her eyes wide open and turning around like she expected the view to change if she did it enough times. “This can’t be.”

“I don't know what you were expecting,” Dean said. He had no idea why she was so lost. “We’re not even supposed to be here.”

“But…”

“Where have you been, anyway?” Dean asked, frowning. Her clothes were too clean and she looked way too hydrated to have been caught up in the middle of the chaos. “I thought you’d be back in London.”

Hermione looked anguished, gaping and blinking to keep the dust of her face.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she stated. “Just last night, all of this…”

“Last night?” Dean repeated. “What are you talking about?”

“Last night!” Hermione said again, and she seemed a second away from going into full freak-out. “Last night, at the bar, the explosion and…”

“You mean the night we met?” Dean interrupted her rambling. “And there was a lunatic in my car?”

“Yes!”

“That was three months ago.”

Hermione covered her mouth with her hands and closed her eyes. It seemed like she was using all her willpower not to scream. Dean pitied her a little, so he put a hand on her shoulder.

“Are you okay?”

“How can it be?” she asked, softly.

“Time-travel!” explained a cheery voice somewhere at his left. Dean jumped and cringed.

“You!” he exclaimed, pointing his gun at the Doctor.

"No, wait!” Hermione tried to stop him, but Dean was already charging against the mad man with the bow tie. He pushed him against a wall and lifted by the lapels of his shirt with his left hand.

“Woah, woah, woah!” the Doctor struggled, but Dean was much stronger. “Why you have to be so aggressive?”

“You had something to do with this!” Dean accused him, waving the gun in the Doctor’s face. “I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but this is your fault and you’re going to fix it!”

“Alright, first of all, you need to put that thing away,” the Doctor said, pushing the gun away. “Somebody could get hurt.”

“Oh, somebody  _is_ going to get hurt,” Dean guaranteed.

“Stop it! Dean, stop!” Hermione pleaded, grabbing him by the arm. Dean growled, but grudgingly let go off the Doctor and backed off. “Now, can you please explain us what happened here?”

For the first time, Dean realized there was genuine confusion in the witch’s expression. “You mean you really don’t know?”

Hermione shook her head, and the Doctor shrugged. “We just landed five minutes ago,” he commented.

Dean didn’t even want to think what that could mean. He opened his mouth, but then he pricked up his ears. A heavy, rhythmic stomping was rapidly growing louder, and he didn’t have to look to know one of  _them_ was about to appear around the corner at any second.

“Not here,” he said, grabbing Hermione’s hand. “Run!”

“That’s my line!” the Doctor complained, but he immediately sprinted after them.

Dean guided them down the street, into a store with the windows broken and the shelves tossed all over the floor with a ceiling full of cracks. He gestured to hide behind the counter, as the stomping become deafening behind them. Dean tried to hold his breath and remain perfectly still, but the Doctor kept shifting in his place until he couldn’t take it a any longer, and got up to peek over the counter. Dean suffocated a curse and pulled him down again, but before he could stop her, Hermione did the exact same thing. At least she had the sense to hide back down immediately.

“Doctor, what are those things?” she asked, as the floor started trembling. Dean counted the seconds until it was safe to come out.

“Cybermen,” the Doctor said. “I don’t know why they’re here. They shouldn’t be here at all.”

“Well, they are,” Dean groaned, and put a finger over his lips to hush him. The Doctor seemed annoyed.

“You know, you are a very rude young man!” he exclaimed.

All the stomping ceased.  _Crap_ .

The store’s door crashed. Dean instinctively jumped over Hermione and rolled away just in time to avoid being squashed between the wall and the counter when the robots threw the door at them. He didn’t have time to look what happened to the Doctor as he helped the witch stand up.  There were two of them (what the hell were they called again? Cybermen? That was a ridiculous name).

“READINGS INDICATE YOU HAVE NOT BEEN UPGRADED,” recited one of them. “SURRENDER FOR UPGRADING.”

“Like hell,” Dean replied, and he raised his gun again. Hermione gasped and the Doctor shouted something, but Dean already knew shooting at them would do exactly nothing, so he pointed at the crack right above them.

The next moment, the Cybermen were covered in debris, pipes and water, and even though they had no expression, Dean could have sworn they looked pissed.

“SURRENDER,” they demanded, trying to advance amongst the rubble. “SURRENDER. SURRENDER…”

Dean didn’t miss a beat. He opened the trap door that led to the store’s basement and dragged Hermione down with him. He caught a glimpse of the Doctor stumbling behind them, but he didn’t pay attention to him and ran towards the fuse board.

"It’s broad day light!” the Doctor shouted. “They will still see us if you cut off the power!”

“Not if they don’t have eyes,” Dean replied, as he pulled the leavers and switches down.

The lightning bulb above their heads sparkled, and there were a couple of loud explosions on the store.

“That way!” Dean screamed, pointing at the boxes he’d piled up under the narrow window.

Hermione crawled out first, and extended her hand. Dean pushed the Doctor up so he could reach for it. There was a second explosion, shorter than the previous one, and the flames started dancing on the basement stairs. Dean dragged himself out, and as soon as he was standing in the asphalt, he shouted at the others to run again. They barely managed to hide in an alley before the whole store blew up. Dean saw the smoke raising over their heads, and his eyes got teary from the ashes. The Doctor walked to the street, and watched the burning store for a second.

“It was a trap,” he said. He sounded impressed.

“Not a very good one,” Dean admitted. “I might as well have hung a big bright neon sign saying ‘Come and get us’. We need to keep moving.”

“Did you put more of those?”

“Yeah, I booby-trapped a couple of streets,” Dean shrugged. “What else was I supposed to do?”

He tried to keep moving, but the Doctor was standing in his way, staring at him, his eyes opening wide, like he was contemplating the hunter under a whole new light.

“You’re angry and you’re rude, but you’re clever,” he said. “Alright, you can come.”

“Come where?” Dean asked. “Doctor, we really should be getting somewhere safe…”

“And we are!” the Doctor said, taking the lead and turning around the corner fast. “Safest place in the universe! Don’t let the witch tells you otherwise!”

“What is he talking about?” Dean asked Hermione. She was smirking, like she knew a secret he didn’t. They turned around the corner, but the Doctor was nowhere to be seen. Instead, they found the infamous blue box, the one that disappeared and made dying whale noises. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Come on,” said Hermione, and her smile got bigger as she run to the open doors. “You have to see this!”

Dean stared at it apprehensively: it seemed small and fragile, even more so just standing there in the middle of the grey empty street and its tumbling buildings.

“The robots are going to tear that thing apart in ten seconds,” Dean guaranteed, walking towards it. “How are you even…?”

He stopped in his tracks. He was standing in the middle of a control room right out of a freaking sci-fi show. Everything was silver and glimmering with a strange blue light coming from the center of a board. The Doctor was running around, pushing buttons and pulling leavers randomly (or so Dean thought. He had stopped trying to find some kind of logic to anything the Doctor did or say).

Dean took a step backwards. Outside the world looked as grey and as destroyed as it had been a second before. To make sure, he closed the door and stared at the blue box. It looked inconspicuous enough, just a wooden blue box with a little light bulb on top. He walked around it to make sure he hadn’t missed anything before, but no, the box was just as wide as the last time. Finally, he opened the door again and yes, the sci-fi room was still there, with Hermione and the Doctor looking at him with sympathetic smiles.

“It takes a minute,” Hermione said.

“I’ll be damn,” Dean muttered. “It’s bigger on the inside.”

“Dimensionally transcendental!” the Doctor exclaimed, cheerfully, spinning dramatically and opening his arms. “That means…”

“We’re in another dimension?” Dean asked. “That’s pretty cool.”

The Doctor stopped his fidgeting for a moment, and threw Dean a stunned glanced. Then, he smiled.

“See? You’re really smart when you’re not having a go at people gun in hand. Now,” he sat over the board and clapped his hands. “If you can enlighten us on what we missed…”

“I don’t know how you could miss it, it was kind of a big deal,” Dean said. “First these… these… Cybermen showed up in hoards all around the world. They start attacking people, taking them away for upgrading. The UN tried to stop them and that’s when things got really Star Trek VI.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Hermione asked.

“It was a conspiracy,” the Doctor clarified. “Everyone was in on it.”

“Politicians, church leaders, freaking Britney Spears, everyone who’s someone, they all had this weird silver thing on one side of their faces,” Dean said, pointing at his own cheek to illustrate the point. “They were all over the world.”

“Europe too?” Hermione asked. She looked anguished. “London?”

Dean nodded. “They were the same as here: martial law, evacuating the cities. I came to this place – you had no idea how hard it was to get passed all the military posts – because…” he stopped. Hermione understood.

“You were looking for your family,” she said.

There was no point denying it. “Last time we spoke, my brother and my dad were in this town with a group of refugees,” Dean said. “When I arrived, I found a whole lot of  _nada_ . I spent days looking for them, and by the time I figured I should leave, there were Cybermen everywhere.”

“So you’ve been hiding from them for days?” Hermione asked.

“A week today,” Dean said. “There’s no way out, they’ve got it surrounded. I don’t even understand how you guys….” Dean trailed off. Right. Dimensionally transcendental phone box. The Doctor seemed to be thinking the same thing, because he immediately started going around the control board again.

“Shouldn’t be problem!” he said. “We’re going to leave right at this moment, and we’ll get to the bottom of all this.”

“I have some theories on what’s going on,” Hermione said. She reached inside her bag and pulled out a book that was three times bigger than any book Dean had ever seen.

“That thing’s bigger on the inside too?” he asked, approaching her as she opened the book.

“I was looking for information about you, Doctor,” she said, pointing at the picture of a guy with a kilt in her book. “And I came upon this wizard, Libatious Cornwall. That’s when the Cybermen attacked me. I think Dean is right: your presence here, they showing up everywhere… it can’t be a coincidence.”

“Of course is not a coincidence,” the Doctor replied. “Coincidences don’t just happen coincidentally… mind pressing that button there?”

Dean obeyed, with a sudden apprehension growing in his gut. “This… this thing doesn’t  _fly_ , does it, Doc?”

“Oh, no,” the Doctor grinned. “It does so much more…”


	5. Defectives

The TARDIS was quivering and jumping, and Hermione’s knuckles looked white from holding onto the railing so hard.

“Doctor!”

“No panic, no panic!” the Doctor said, in a rather panicky tone, as he somehow managed to still stand and run around the uneven ground. “We are having a bit of rough landing, that’s all!”

“No kidding!” Dean shouted.

The ship gave another brusque shake, making the hunter lose his grip and roll on the floor. Hermione was sure she would’ve heard the thump of his head against the floor if it hadn’t been for the deafening, acute noises coming from everywhere.

“Alright, alright, I think I’ve got it!” the Doctor exclaimed, triumphal. He pushed a button, and the alarms and movement stopped altogether.

Dean lifted his head. “Is it over?” he asked.

Hermione wished he hadn’t done that.

The TARDIS promptly plummeted into the void, and this time not even the Doctor could maintain his balance. Hermione allowed herself two seconds for screaming hysterically, and then she reached for her wand. Fighting against the force of the fall, she stood up, and using the walls as support, she advanced step by step towards the TARDIS’ exit.

“The hell are you doing?!” Dean asked, his eyes wide open in horror.

“Help me out!” Hermione screamed back, one hand already on the doorknob.

Dean reacted fast: he stood up, hooked an arm around Hermione’s waist and held on tight to the rail with his other hand.

Hermione breathed deeply, and opened the door. The wind made her eyes teary and her hair flap around her face. Trying not to notice how far the ground was and how fast it was coming at them, Hermione raised her wand and cried: “ _Arresto Momentum_!”

Immediately, the fall slowed down. It was like the ship had become a lot lighter, and now they were just calmly floating down in the breeze. A few seconds later, the TARDIS landed as softly as a feather.

“Okay,” Hermione sighed and looked inside. Dean was closing his eyes and still clutching the rail. “It’s done,” she told him.

Dean opened one eye. “Are you sure?”

Hermione nodded, and with trembling knees, she staggered outside. They were on top of a hill, somewhere isolated and dark, dark enough for the stars to shine above their heads. The grass underneath their feet was dry and it crunched when she took a couple of steps forward. Except for a few naked trees, there was nothing else around but them and the TARDIS.

The Doctor was the first to speak: “What were you thinking? That was really dangerous!”

“Well, since the inside of the TARDIS is dimensionally transcendental and much bigger, I figured the spell to break its fall should be cast on the outside,” Hermione explained.

“That…!” the Doctor began, then shut his mouth and scratched his head. “That’s actually very logical. Well thought.”

“Guys,” Dean asked after taking a look around. “Where are we? And _when_ are we?”

The Doctor pulled out a pocket watch from his jacket and opened it. It had twelve hands and planets instead of numbers, and Hermione recognized it as a wizard’s watch. The Doctor stared at it for a couple of seconds, and then put it away again. “December 31st, 1999,” he informed them, although it completely escaped Hermione how he’d come up with that date. “Turn of the century.”

“Well, I don’t think we’re getting to see fireworks anytime soon, Doc,” Dean commented, and pointed ahead.

Hermione moved to stand by him, and the view made her shudder. At the bottom of the hill there were dismembered parts of Cybermen, spread all over for what seemed like several miles. Further away, silhouetted against the starry night-sky, there was a dome that looked threatening even at that distance.

“That’s it, isn’t it, Doctor?” Hermione asked. “The place you were trying to find? The energy source that’s been feeding the Cybermen?”

“Yes,” the Doctor said. His tone was somber.

“Well?” Dean asked. “We go inside, we deactivate it, we get rid of the robots. That’s what you said we had to do, right?”

“Wrong,” the Doctor answered. “It’s wrong, all of it. Why did we crash? Why did we jump ahead in time? I didn’t tell her to do that,” he added, turning to the TARDIS. “She can be unpredictable, but she’s never been _this_ unpredictable. Not unless…” his voice trailed off.

“Unless what?” Hermione asked, but the Doctor didn’t answer.

“No, but that’s impossible,” he muttered.

“Look, Doc, I don’t know what you’re on about,” Dean intervened. “But the best way to put an end to all of this is to get in there and find out what’s going on ourselves.”

He didn’t say it, but Hermione could guess what he was thinking as clearly as she had cast a Legilimency spell on him: the sooner this was over, the sooner he could start looking for his family. She was worried about her parents and her friends too (oh, God, if the Doctor was right, then it meant they had been left in this mess without news from her in months), but the idea of walking in blind into a place that could be filled to the brim with Cybermen wasn’t particularly attractive.

“We need a plan,” she said.

The Doctor snapped out of his pensiveness. “But we have a plan,” he said, and he’d recovered his chirpy tone. “We get in there and we find out what’s going on ourselves. Let’s go!”

“That’s not a plan!” Hermione protested, but the Doctor was already strolling down the hill, even whistling to himself a little. Well, he was until they heard him gasp and fall loudly among the mechanic parts.

“Blimey, it’s dark down here,” he commented.

Hermione sighed, raised her wand again and whispered: “ _Lumos_.” The tip of her wand immediately lit up. They caught up with the Doctor, who was rubbing his behind.

“So what you think happened with these?” Dean asked, while the move amongst the abandoned pieces. Up close, they looked even more menacing: the empty sockets of the heads seemed to follow them around, and they had to be very careful not to stumble on a disembodied arm or leg. “Defectives?”

“The Cybermen don’t do defectives,” the Doctor replied. “They’re extremely efficient in that aspect.”

“They seem to have been… ripped,” Hermione observed. “Torn apart somehow. But what could…?”

Dean hushed her, and pulled out his gun, which made the Doctor roll his eyes.

“Do you think you can solve every problem by shooting at it?” he scolded him.

Dean hushed him too. Before the Doctor could protest again, Hermione heard it too: the mechanic stomping, coming their way. She concentrated, and the light from her wand grew brighter.

“What are you doing?” Dean asked. “Turn that off.”

“Well, unless you can shoot in the dark…”

“I don’t think it really matters now,” the Doctor interrupted them.

Hermione looked up and her heart sank. They were surrounded: there at least ten or fifteen Cybermen, standing right outside the light. They were different from the ones she’d seen before though: they were pitch black instead of silver, and they seemed slightly bigger. One of them took a step forwards.

“THE DOCTOR AND HIS COMPANIONS WILL SURRENDER,” the Cyberman said. “IF THEY DO, NO ONE WILL GET HURT.”

Hermione frowned. That was way too articulated. Dean took out the safety from his gun with a muffled click.

“Yeah, I’m thinking no,” he said.

“THE COMPANIONS WILL RELINQUISH THEIR WEAPONS,” the Cyberman continued. “OTHERWISE, WE ARE AUTHORIZED TO USE FORCE.”

“Authorized by whom?” Hermione asked. “Cornwall?”

“WE HAVE NO AUTHORIZATION TO DISCLOSE THAT INFORMATION,” the Cyberman replied. “RELINQUISH YOUR WEAPONS. SURRENDER PACIFICALLY. WE WILL NOT HURT THE DOCTOR OR THE COMPANIONS.”

Dean’s finger was trembling on the trigger.

“Dean, it isn’t worth it,” Hermione told him. “We should just go with them.”

“How do we know they’re not going to kill us?” Dean asked, stubbornly.

“WE ARE NOT PROGRAMMED TO KILL,” the Cyberman. “ONLY TO MAIM OR RENDER UNCONSCIOUS.”

“Doc, you ain’t buying this crap, are you?” Dean asked.

The Doctor was silent. Once again, his face cringed in a serious expression. Then, very slowly, he reached inside his pocket and took out his screwdriver. He leaned down and left it on the floor.

“Do what they say,” he ordered.

“Are you kidding me?” Dean asked, incredulous. Hermione was already putting out her wand.

“Trust me,” the Doctor said. “You don’t have a trap prepared for this, Dean. You can’t win it.”

Dean gritted his teeth, but in the end, he imitated his two partners. He kept looking defiantly at the Cybermen as they picked up the gun.

“You better not lose it,” he threatened them. Hermione wasn’t sure what good would his bravado do under those circumstances.

The Cybermen advanced, put a cold hand in each of their shoulder, and firmly, forced them to keep walking towards the dome.

 

* * *

 

The first thing Hermione understood was they had absolutely no chance to have entered to the dome unannounced. There were cameras, motion detectors and automated doors with panels that only opened when the Cybermen typed some very intricate passwords. Even with the Doctor’s screwdriver and her magic, they would’ve been detected sooner or later.

The second thing she noticed was that the place _looked_ so technologically advanced it wasn’t possible Cornwall had built it all by himself. The Doctor was looking up and down at the screens on the walls that showed images from other corridors, each with a number assigned to them.

“There are twelve,” Dean commented in a whisper. “Twelve corridors, one main room. The place is shaped like a clock. This Cornwall guy sounds pretty obsessive.”

“Not only that, but all of this,” the Doctor said, with an encompassing hand gesture. “All of this is Cybermen technology. I don’t even know how he managed to get his hands on them.”

“Combined with the magic Cornwall could perform, who knows what kind of effects that might have,” Hermione reflected. “Maybe that’s the reason your TARDIS was acting weird, Doctor.”

“Could be,” the Doctor muttered, without compromising.

They finally reached the end of the hallway. The Cybermen that were escorting them typed one last password, and stepped aside. The room in front of them was terrifyingly black when contrasted with the cold white light from the rest of the fortress.

“YOU WILL BE RECEIVED ALONE,” the main Cyberman said.

Hermione exchanged a look with Dean, and then another with the Doctor, who smiled at them confidently, and strutted inside. Dean reached for Hermione’s hand, and they followed him.

The door closed behind them with a puff.

Hermione blinked a couple of time. The place wasn’t as dark as she first thought: there was a golden glow coming from (of all things) a chimney with a tall armchair in front of it. Instead of screens, the walls were covered with bookshelves. Compared with the steely, almost sterile aesthetic of the rest of the lair, this almost had homely feeling about it. It was like… a combination of Gryffindor’s common room and Hogwart’s library.

Definitely a room a wizard would design.

“Alright,” the Doctor boomed. “No more games, Libatious. Show yourself.”

An amused chuckle came from the armchair. Hermione got goosebumps. The laughter was too acute to belong to a man, and when the person in the armchair spoke, the voice was definitely female:

“Oh, Doctor,” the woman said. “Don’t flatter yourself. You aren’t the one I’m interested in.”

Hermione recognized her. She knew who she would be seeing a split second before the woman stood up and faced them with a satisfied grin in her face.

In front of them, there was the witch from the Washington State Library.


	6. Machinations

She stood before in the dim light the fire cast in the room. She was wearing what seemed to be an old-fashioned long dress, with a blue cardigan over it. Her dark black hair fell in waves over her shoulders, and she looked a little older than the robot in the library had. Her wand was in her hand, and she kept nervously fidgeting with it, like she was deciding whether she should point it at them or not. Hermione felt the inside of her sleeve empty, and with a fretting knot in her stomach, she realized they were trapped and defenseless. 

The Doctor, however, looked more curious than worried about their circumstances. 

“Alright, now I’m very confused,” he admitted. 

The witch laughed at him, as if he had told some sort of very funny joke. 

“You aren’t the only one who has mastered time travel,” the witch continued, with a posh accent as old-fashioned as her dress. “I have, for many years now, been a bit of a traveler myself.” 

“That’s impossible,” Hermione said, because of course she couldn’t keep quiet about this issue. “Magic time travel can only go backwards, and for a few hours at a time…” 

“Ah, but magic in combination with the right technology is another matter entirely,” said the witch. She spun in the middle of a room, with the dress twirling around her legs as she went for her books. 

“That would make the technology unstable,” Hermione argued. “It’s the reason wizards don’t have much electronics: magic makes them unpredictable and dangerous.” 

“Yes, yes,” the other witch stopped spinning with a huff of impatience. “But time travel is already so unstable and unpredictable that it doesn’t really matter if you add a little more to the mix, no?” 

“I’m getting a headache,” Dean complained. 

The witch stopped for a moment and took a step towards the hunter. 

“And who are you?” she asked, frowning. The wrinkles in her face and around her eyes made her look even older than before. 

“Just a guy who got caught in your machinations, lady,” Dean replied with a shrug and a half smirk. 

Hermione wanted to step on his foot or elbowed him in the shoulder to get him to shut up, but the witch seemed to find him hilarious, because she opened her mouth (her tooth looked crooked and yellowish in the dim light), and let out a dissonant cackle. 

“A muggle!” she said, clapping her hands like a kid who’d just seen something really amusing at a circus or a zoo. “That’s great! I think I will use you for my next experiment…” 

“Doctor, what’s wrong with her?” Hermione asked, in a whisper. 

“I’m not sure,” the Doctor said. “It may have something to do with those experiments she keeps mentioning…” 

“I’m gonna go out on a limp and say it’s just a run-of-the-mill case of the crazies,” Dean interrupted him. 

“ _You_ would say so, of course,” the witch replied, standing in front of Dean and pointing at him with his wand. The hunter didn’t seem affected, but he had the good sense to step backwards. “ _They_ all said so. They kept saying _‘Eloise, it can’t be done, Eloise, it’s too dangerous…’_ But I’ve shown them,” the witch continued, as she walked around the room, almost like she had forgotten there were other people there, listening to her ramble. “I’ve shown them all… the jump forwards _is_ possible, and so is the jump backwards, and in every direction you want to go…” 

Something clicked inside Hermione’s mind. 

“Eloise?” she repeated. “You’re Eloise Mintumble?” 

The witch lifted her gaze at Hermione, who couldn’t help but to jump when she saw her eyes. They looked swollen and deranged, like she was lost, and not entirely sure of what Hermione was saying. 

“Why, yes,” the witch said, frowning. “Yes, that is my name.” 

“Then two cybermen in the library,” Hermione remembered. “The ones that looked like you and… you put them there in case anybody asked for your name or Libatious’.” 

“Yes!” the witch clapped, as if she was very pleased Hermione had figured it out. “Exactly! I couldn’t have anyone discovering me, interrupting my plans. Unless that someone was extraordinarily smart,” she added, grabbing Hermione’s hand so fast she didn’t have time to snatch it from her. “Like you. You’re Hermione Granger. They say you’re very smart, so maybe you can help. You see, the vortex has been a little unstable lately…” 

“The vortex?” the Doctor repeated, blinking. “How do you know about that?” 

“Hush, I’m not talking to you, you meddling alien,” Eloise rolled her eyes. “I’m talking to her. Come, see this,” she added, pulling Hermione to the middle of the room.

“W-Wait…” Hermione stuttered, but the witch didn’t pay any attention as she touched with her wand the bricks on top of the chimney. 

Slowly, but surely, the bricks started moving aside, reveling a glass case behind them full what Hermione first took for sand, floating in a vacuum. But as she kept observing it, she started to notice the sand glittered with silver light, lighting up the room with patterns, whirls, little changes or variations here and there within the most complicated cyclical movements. It was more fluid and more versatile than any sand, almost a liquid in the way that it changed and spiraled up, and then down again, ever-changing, ever-moving. 

Hermione shuddered. She recognized it, of course she did. She’d only seen it once, briefly, five or six years (she couldn’t know for sure) before, at the Department of Mysteries. She remembered the bell jar with the tiny hummingbird inside, she remembered the same glittering lights as the bird grew and became a fledgling again, over and over. 

She also remembered Rabstan Lestrange’s head, how it shrunk and how it bellowed as it tried to reach for them after his head came in contact with the inside of the bell jar. 

“What the hell is that?” asked Dean, after barely managing to close his jaw. 

“Time,” the Doctor answered, blinking. “That is a tiny part of the Vortex, a piece of its essence. But that’s impossible!” he added looking at Eloise. 

“Not impossible,” the witch replied with a shrug. “Difficult, yes, but not impossible. Nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it… and a little bit magic never hurts either.” 

“So this is what you used?” Hermione asked, making an effort to pry her eyes from the hypnotizing dancing lights. “To travel through time?” 

“Yes,” Eloise nodded, enthusiastically. She clearly had been expecting for years to have someone smart enough to converse about it. “First the experiment was to send backwards, for more than just a few hours,” she explained. “But instead of going backwards, I went _forwards_ , you understand?” 

“You went forwards,” Hermione said, nodding slowly. “And you met the Cybermen.” 

“Yes!” Eloise said, clapping once again. “And with their technology, and my magic, we could do anything we wanted. It was just a matter of moving to specific points in time. Changing a little thing here, installing a piece of technology into the brain or this or that world leader. They were supposed to be activated today, you know? Turn of the century, but my calculations failed and everything started happening a little bit early. But it doesn’t matter. In the end, we’ve created a brand new world!” 

She laughed; a chilling, dissonant laugh. Like she had just told the funniest joke in the Universe, but she was the only one who understood it and didn’t expect anyone else to join her. 

“You didn’t create a new world,” the Doctor intervened. For the first time since they had met him, he sounded angry. Dean grabbed Hermione by the arm and gently pushed her away from the Doctor. She didn’t opposed: the man in the bowtie, who up until that moment had seen like a lovable fool, now had a dangerous, empty look in his eyes as he raised an accusing finger at Eloise: “You have purposefully messed with the timelines, disregarding the fixed points in time. You have completely obliterated what should have been!” 

“No, not obliterated,” Eloise shook her head. “Changed. I changed it all. I changed it for the better, Doctor. Don’t you understand? Now the world is brand new, it has been… how do the cybermen call it?” She touched her lips with two fingers, in a pensive gesture. “Upgraded. The world has been upgraded.” 

“You have no idea what’s been going on out there, do you?” Dean asked. 

“No,” the witch shrugged. “Not at all. Why would I care what happens out there? I’m a scientist. An investigator. My place is here, in my laboratory. Everything else is just… temporary.” 

She laughed at her own joke. The Doctor was glaring at her so intensely that Hermione wondered if it would be necessary for them to restrain him. 

“You’ve changed everything!” he shouted. “And you can’t even see how dangerous that is! The Universe could be on the edge of coming undone, the Vortex itself could collapse!” 

“Well, then I’ll build a new one,” the witch said, with a dismissive gesture towards the glass case. “A more stable one this time. Oh, I could travel around history and convince the most famous, the cleverest wizards and witches to help me. We could change so many things!” 

The Doctor was practically vibrating with rage as Eloise kept talking. He was clenching his fist and narrowing his eyes at her, and for a second, Hermione truly believed he was about to push Eloise against the glass case. 

“Very well,” Dean interrupted them, calmly. “You’re a scientist, I get that. But I mean, you sound like someone who’s very proud of her work, right?” 

Eloise straightened her back and lifted her chin. “Of course,” she did. “Why wouldn’t I be proud? I have accomplished the impossible.” 

“Yeah, you’ve mentioned that,” Dean said. “So, if you’re so proud of it, why don’t you come out and check it out?” 

Eloise blinked at him, probably wondering the same thing Hermione was: what exactly was Dean trying to accomplish there? 

“Check it out?” she repeated, frowning deeply, as if she thought Dean was suddenly talking in a language she didn’t understand. 

“Yeah,” Dean smiled confidently. “I’m sure you want to see what your work has done for the world first hand, right? The Doctor can take you to see it.” 

“No, I won’t…,” the Doctor protested, but Dean elbowed him in the ribs to shut him up. 

“Come on, what do you say, Lis? (Can I call you Lis?) Why don’t you get out of here for a bit?” 

Something clicked in Hermione’s mind. Of course. It was so simple it was genius. Dean was trying to goad Eloise into the TARDIS. Once she was there, the Doctor would probably be able to take her back to her own time. That might fix what she had done, revert her meeting the cybermen… 

“Yes!” she said out loud, both because she understood it, and because she wanted to support Dean’s argument. “I mean, it seems you’ve been trapped in this room for a while, haven’t you? I can’t imagine that’s good for your inventive. Maybe a stroll outside, some fresh air would help you to find the solution to fix the unstable Vortex…” 

The Doctor looked at them like they had gone mad. Hermione could only hope it dawned on him what they were trying to do. 

It obviously wasn’t dawning on Eloise, luckily. The witch was opening her mouth, then closing it again, like a fish out of the water trying to breathe. 

“That… that sounds really nice,” she said, in the end. “Yes. It could be helpful. Definitely. I…” 

“Well, come on, then,” Dean said, offering the witch his hand. “Let’s get out of here.” 

Eloise took a step backwards, at the same time a bitter smile appeared on her lips. 

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.” 

For a terrifying second, Hermione thought she had finally seen through them. And then she added something that was even more terrifying: 

“I’m afraid neither of us can leave this room.” 

“What do you mean?” Hermione asked, hoping her voice wasn’t trembling as much as she was. 

“I’m not allowed to leave until I had fixed the energy source so the Cybermen can keep travelling and doing their work,” Eloise said. “Some of them are exploding for no reason. You must have seen them outside. They don't like that.” 

She gave them a little apologetic smile as Hermione swallowed loudly. 

That wasn’t a lab or the cybermen’s headquarters. That was Eloise’s prison. 

“What do you mean you’re not _allowed_?” Dean asked, frowning deeply. 

“The cybers… they’re not really happy that things had been so unstable lately,” Eloise explained. “So they don’t want me to go anywhere until I fixed it. That’s why I asked them to bring you here, because I knew you,” she added, pointing at Hermione “are supposed to be very smart. I didn’t want them to bring you,” she added, pointing at the Doctor. “I knew you’d get jealous of my work, I knew you wouldn’t understand it…” 

“I’m not jealous of your work!” the Doctor scream. “I am baffled at how someone smart enough to concentrate a part of the Vortex in there by magic would be stupid enough to mess with the fundamental laws of time and…” 

“Yes, yes,” Eloise said, rolling her eyes like the Doctor’s rambling exhausted her. “Like I said: jealous and incomprehensive.” 

She turned her back on them to hover over some notebooks and pieces of parchment on her desk. She started messing them up and writing things down with empty quills at the same time she sang a lullaby under her breath about a giant and poltergeist. 

Hermione recognized it: it was a popular wizard’s song for children. She’d heard Mrs. Weasley singing it sometimes while she washed the dishes or cooked in her kitchen, and the association made her tremble. She still had Ginny’s latest letter in her bag, unopened. And to think she had been mad at Ron for not writing her since she’d arrived to America! She had no idea what’d happened to him, or her parents, or Harry… 

“But this is your world, Eloise,” she said out loud. The witch straightened her back, and looked at her, blinking. “This is your world. They couldn’t have created without you. The way I see it, everything they’d accomplish, they did thanks to you.” 

A slow, proud grin appeared in Eloise’s face. 

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, you’re quite right, my dear girl.” 

“Then who are they to _allow_ you to do anything?” Hermione kept insisting. “You’re the witch who mastered time-travel. They shouldn’t be telling you what you have to do; you ought to be telling _them_.” 

“Yes,” Eloise agreed. A manic, strange glimmer appeared in her eyes. “Yes, they should be listening to me. They should be following my orders.” 

“Totally,” Dean agreed. “Don’t you want to get out of this place and let those overrated toasters know who’s the boss of them?” 

Eloise looked much more animated than she had been at the beginning. She was standing up straight, and when she pulled her greasy hair back, Hermione thought she saw a glimpse of the brilliant witch she must have been once. 

“But they have weapons,” she reflected out loud, without looking at anyone in particular, as if she was talking to herself. “They have weapons and they can’t be destroyed with magic. I’ve tried. That’s why they locked me up in here.” 

“In that case let us help you,” Hermione insisted. “Let us get you out of here. We’re some of the most brilliant minds this Universe has to offer. I’m sure we can figure a way out, a way to get the cybermen to recognize what you’ve done for them.” 

Eloise’s chest swelled up. Hermione had hit the nail in the hand: she liked her experiments and her little glass case, but recognition was the thing she crave the most, and she didn’t seem to particularly care from whom it came. 

“Yes. Let us, Eloise,” the Doctor added. His tone was much softer, but by the way he kept clenching the edge of his sleeves, Hermione figures he was still furious. “Showed me what you’ve done. Convince me it’s been for the best.” 

Eloise’s eyes continued to glimmer. She nodded enthusiastically, and put one of her long fingers against her lips. 

“We must be very careful,” she said, pointing at one of the walls next to them. “Walls have ears.”


	7. Loop

Dean was beginning to wonder if convincing Eloise of escaping was a good idea. They had marched into that room thinking they were going to find an evil genius manipulator, and what they’d found instead had been an aging woman with a hesitant mind. She had been manipulated by the cybermen, and now they were doing the same to her. Yes, perhaps she was to blame for the entire disaster history had become, but she was also clearly losing herself after so many travels and experiments. Dean couldn’t avoid a twinge of compassion for her.

“How long have you been travelling, Eloise?” he asked her. Because, obviously, she was susceptible to the passing of time. The cybermen didn’t age or rust, but the same thing couldn’t be said for the witch who, at the end of the day, continued to be human.

Eloise stopped looking for whatever she was looking in her desk and stared at him blinking, like she hadn’t understood the question. 

“Time is an illusion,” she told him. “You perceive time as going into a straight line, but it’s different for me. I’m free to move in whatever direction I feel like…” 

“So you have no idea how long have you been gone,” Dean said, trying to reformulate the question. “From your own time, I mean.” 

“None at all,” she said, with a wicked grin appearing on her face. “And I don’t miss it. I’ve seen things you could never imagine.” 

“I’ve got a pretty active imagination,” Dean shrugged. 

“There it is!” announced the Doctor from the other end of the room after pulling a book from the shelves. 

Dean remembered he was supposed to be looking for cameras and either destroying them or covering them up, while the others built a thing that would supposedly help them escape. He wasn’t exactly sure how or why, because the Doctor had spoken way too fast with too many terms he didn’t know. The only part he’d understood is that they were looking for something that looked like a ball of crystal but wasn’t exactly a ball of crystal. 

Eloise raised a ball of crystal from the mess that was her desk. 

“And I have it, Doctor,” she said, with the same proud smile she’d had while talking about her accomplishments. “Now we can create it.” 

Dean wasn’t sure what “it” was either, except that it was dangerous and highly unstable and he was going to regret asking details, so he didn’t. 

Hermione moved closer, with an open book between her hands. She looked a little too concerned for Dean’s liking. In fact, she looked pale, like she was about to vomit. 

“Hey,” Dean put a hand over her arm. “Are you okay?” 

“There’s a million things that could go wrong with this, and every single one of them could be my fault,” Hermione said. Then she breathed deeply and her features softened, like getting that out of her chest had been enough to help her find relief. “I’m alright,” she promised. 

“Let’s begin!” Eloise shouted, again with that maddened glimmer in her eyes. She took out her wand and pointed it at the crystal case where “time” kept flowing and changing in front of their eyes. “This is a very delicate substance she said. “Fleeting and terrible if you don’t know how to control it,” she continued saying. She sounded like a science teacher explaining a very delicate experiment to her students. She flicked her wrist and the case moved up, just barely. Through the smallest of cracks at its base, the glimmering substance began escaping. Eloise moved her wand again, and time started pouring inside the ball of crystal in her hand. “Now, dear girl,” she indicated when the crystal was almost full. 

Hermione took a step forwards. Dean thought he saw a slight tremor in her hand, but he convinced himself he had imagined it. 

She started chanting in a very low tone. Dean didn’t catch what she was saying, but he understood some Latin words in her murmur. Her chest went up and down rhythmically, like every breath she took and every pause in her incantation had to be carefully calculated. 

The ball of crystal in Eloise’s hand rose up in the air, barely a few inches away from the witch’s palm. The fluid inside of it started spiraling and changing, and the air around it crackled with static. Dean could smell ozone and felt the heat against his skin, like the ball had become a miniature storm waiting to escape. It was fascinating to watch, but he kept watching Hermione like a hawk. 

She continued moving her lips at great speed, her bushy hair growing messier as the temperature of the room raised. Her eyes were glued to the ball, and Dean was pretty certain she wasn’t even blinking. Her face was beginning to acquire an intense tone of red, and he saw a drop of sweat forming on the side of his forehead. Whatever she was doing, it was beginning to weigh on her. 

Dean tried to catch the Doctor’s eye, but the guy was also staring at the ball with his full concentration. Despite having been so angry not ten minutes before, now he seemed fascinated, his lips slightly open, his eyes following the changes of the “time” with laser precision. 

And when he looked at the little ball again, Dean understood why. The fluid inside was spinning, forming a mini-tornado within the confines of the glass. It didn’t look so fluid anymore; in fact, it seemed like it was gaining corporeity, becoming heavier and less ethereal with every second that passed. He could have sworn he saw small lightning flashing inside the ball, as the little tornado gain speed, as the temperature in the room rose to unbearable levels. 

Hermione’s chanting had become frantic. Eloise began drawing circles in the air, but it was hard to tell if she was doing it voluntarily or if she was continuing with that movement automatically, because she looked like a doll (or worse, a cyber) following what it had been programmed to do, unable to stop. Both witches’ faces were wet with sweat now, and her lips were chapped, like all the water in her body was escaping her through the pores. 

Dean was about to shout at the Doctor that they had to stop, that Hermione couldn’t take it anymore when _something_ changed. The ball of glass creaked and crackle as its sides began to sink, slowly at first, faster as the pressure continued to work on it. The tornado inside was definitely slowing down, with the colorless substance turning golden and then brown right before his eyes. The substance of “time” had been condensed into a fine powder that was slowly but surely losing speed inside of the ball, that wasn’t really a ball anymore. It was shaped like an hourglass now. 

Hermione shouted one last word, and the sand inside the hourglass stopped spinning suddenly and fell to its base. The young witch stumbled, so Dean hurried to grab her by the elbow. She was breathing heavily, and even through the clothes, Dean could feel how her skin was unnaturally hot. 

“You did it, child!” Eloise said, and she would have probably clapped if her hands weren’t so busy with her wand and the hourglass. “Your first Time Turner! You should be proud!” 

“Doctor,” Dean called out, as he helped Hermione sat on a chair. “Doctor, she needs some water.” 

“Fascinating!” the Doctor muttered to himself, as he took a step near Eloise to watch closer what she had in her hand. “I’ve heard the rumors, but I never thought…” 

“Doctor!” Dean insisted, but Hermione put a hand on his forearm and shook her head. 

“I’m fine,” she said. 

“It’s perfect,” Eloise was saying, as she delicately made it descend on her palm. “I can’t believe this is the work of an amateur! You would make a fun Unspeakable…” 

“Let me see that,” the Doctor said, snatching it from Eloise’s grasp before she could give it to him. “Yes, I see. So this is how it works…” 

 “What is that thing?” Dean asked, still worried about Hermione’s sickly aspect. The Doctor was on the other side of the room, still holding onto the small hourglass and very purposefully keeping it away from Eloise’s hands while he passed a very thin chain on the tip of it. “What exactly does it do?” 

“It’s a Time-Turner,” Hermione explained with a hoarse voice. “It can take us back in time.” 

“Okay, sure,” Dean sighed, because at this point he wasn’t even certain he should be questioning it. “And how is that supposed to help us escape?” 

“Well, the details are a little fuzzy,” the Doctor said, as he threw the chain around Hermione and Dean’s necks. “But let’s not dwell on it, shall we?” 

“Wait, Doctor!” Eloise shouted. “What are you doing? You’re supposed to take me…” 

“Sorry, Eloise,” the Doctor said. “You’re not coming on this ride.” 

The witch let out an angry shout and jumped towards the three prisoners… but stumbled and fell face first on the floor. The space where they had been standing a second before was completely empty. 

“Doctor!” she howled again. 

The door of Eloise’s chamber opened again. The Doctor, Dean and Hermione stumbled inside, with cinder on their clothes and faces, and exhausted expressions. 

“Well,” the Doctor said. “That was fun.”


	8. Do Over

Dean suffered a moment of panic he would later deny until the day he died, but nobody could have blamed him. His feet were leaving the ground one second, with the world spinning around him in one colorful splash. He hang on to whatever was closest (it turned out to be the Doctor’s arm), and closed his arms until the felt something firm beneath his feet again.

“Okay, what the…?” he muttered, opening his eyes.

The Cyber-Dome towered in front of them, with the scrapyard they had found earlier as undisturbed as before.

“How…?”

“No time for that!” said the Doctor, as he looked up at the sky. “I believe we’re about to land now. Run, run, run!”

They didn’t need to be told twice. They practically leapt down at the scrapyard, and hunched behind a mountain of dismembered cybermen. Hermione shouted “ _Arresto Momentum!”_ except she didn’t, because she was right there by Dean’s side and she hadn’t opened her mouth. A second later, they saw the TARDIS, landed pacifically on the ground.

The Doctor stepped outside of it.

“What were you thinking?” he said to someone behind him. “That was really dangerous!”

Hermione came out of the box next, and afterwards…

Hermione and the Doctor (the one who were by his side) grabbed him by the jacket and pulled him down so he would be hidden by the mountain of dismembered cybermen.

“Get down!” the Doctor murmured. “You can’t see you! There are too many paradoxes at work as it, we can’t risk one more!”

“But that’s us!” Dean protested, almost tempted to look up again just to make sure.

“That’s us two hours ago,” Hermione explained in a whisper. “We’ve traveled back.”

The mother of all headaches was starting to grow inside Dean’s skull, but he decided the best course of action was to ignore everything.

“Awesome,” he sighed. A light behind them started shinning, meaning that Hermione (the past Hermione) had lit up her wand again. “So what do we do right about now?”

“Now the Cybermen come to disarm us and escorts us inside,” Hermione reminded him.

“So that means we can follow them,” Dean said, hanging to whatever plan made sense at the moment. “And get back my gun and your wand and… the Doctor’s beeping thing.”

“It’s a sonic…” the Doctor began protesting, but both Hermione and Dean covered his mouth.

They heard the stomping coming from the dome straight towards where their past selves were standing. Dean remembered being too distracted by all the robots to even consider looking around, so he risked taking a peek. He counted ten Cybermen and two more for back-up surrounding them.

“THE DOCTOR AND HIS COMPANIONS WILL SURRENDER,” was demanding the Cyberman closest to them.

Dean saw himself giving up his gun, and then one of the robots put a hand on his shoulder. They were practically hauled in the Dome’s direction, but the Cyberman that had collected their weapons remained behind with a couple more. He liked his chances better now.

“What are you doing?!” exclaimed the Doctor when Dean practically jumped from behind of the pile.

“Making the most of our time,” Dean replied. Before either the Doctor or Hermione could stop him, he grabbed the closest head around, and with all his strength, threw it in the Cybers direction. It hit one of them in the head with a metallic “clank”, and the Cyber rotated his head over his body, looking for the source of the attack. “Right up here, you metallic ass!”

The Cybermen finally seemed to localize him and all four raised their arms, but Dean didn’t stay and waited for them to take aim. He grabbed a dismembered arm and slid down the junk mountain in one swooping movement. He practically landed at the feet of their captors, and had their weapons pointing at his face in two seconds.

“YOU WILL SURRENDER,” one of them demanded. “YOU WILL SURRENDER FOR UPGRADING…”

“Upgrade this!” Dean shouted.

And he raised the arm he had picked up.

Of course, he was bluffing. He had no idea if it would work, and even if he had been sure, he still wouldn’t have known how to operate Cybermen technology. But he said it with such confidence that the Cybermen hesitated. Apparently, their own weapons were the only thing that could stop them. Dean kept that in mind, and threw the arm directly at the head of the Cybermen holding his gun.

The hit didn’t bring him down, obviously, but it did distract him enough to put his arms defensively and dropped his bounty. Dean slid down and grabbed what was nearest: Hermione’s wand.

The witch and the Doctor were standing on top of the pile, looking down but not daring to intervene. Dean heard the Cybermen’s weapon charging. He had less than a second to make his decision.

“Catch!” he shouted, throwing the wand in her direction.

He didn’t get to see if she did, because a silver fist collided with the side of his head and threw him to the ground. But a second later, he heard her shout: “ _BOMBARDA MAXIMA_!” at the top of her lungs, and he knew it had worked because the Cyberman closest to him disintegrated in a flash of white light.

Dean rolled over his back, grabbed another dismembered part, and threw it blindly over his shoulder. A second explosion reverberated through the junkyard, and the next thing he knew, somebody was grabbing him by the shoulders and hauling him back to his feet.

“What were you thinking?!” the Doctor screamed, or at least, that’s what Dean thought he heard, because his ears were buzzing and he was pretty certain one of them was bleeding. But he had completely lost his sense of orientation, so he couldn’t tell which one.

“ _BOMBARDA MAXIMA_!” Hermione repeated, and now there was only one Cyberman left, advancing towards where Dean and the Doctor were standing . “Doctor, watch out!”

The Doctor looked over his shoulder, and pointed his screwdriver at the Cyberman, who froze in its spot vibrating. The beeping noise became so loud that even Dean could hear it. A second later, the Cyberman fell to the ground, harmless and defeated.

“As I was saying,” the Doctor continued shouting. “That was really stupid and dangerous!”

“What?!”

Hermione said something and then pointed at him with her wand. Before Dean had time to get scared about it, his hearing returned, amplified and punctuated by his terrible headache.

“Sorry,” Hermione cringed. “I’m not really good at healing spells.”

“No, it’s… oh, son of a…” Dean muttered, opening and closing his jaw several times as if that would help him feel a little more like himself.

“You shouldn’t have done that!” the Doctor continued, now he was certain Dean could hear every one of his words. “There are a lot of things that could have gone wrong with that. You could have got yourself killed!”

“Well, I had to try,” Dean answered, angrily. “You said you didn’t have a plan, and if it didn’t work out, you two could just go back and have a do over.”

“Dean, that’s not how it works,” Hermione intervened.

“And besides, it doesn’t matter,” Dean continued. “I don’t have magical or time-travelling powers, okay? I’m just a hunter. If someone has a chance at taking on these Cybers, it’s you two.”

The statement was followed by a stunned silence. Dean kicked the closest head, wishing he had kept quiet about it. He was about to add something defensive along the lines of “What? You know it’s true!” when the Doctor shook his head.

“Let’s move on,” he said. “Time’s running out. Literally.”

They didn’t find any more cybermen on their way towards the dome, which could only mean two things. One, they had stopped looking at the junkyard because they thought they already had them, in which case, they were in for a nasty surprise. Or two, they had seen them coming and they were regrouping somewhere to ambush them. In which case, well… Dean held on to his recovered gun a little tighter than it was necessary.

They stalked the halls in silence for a moment, heading back towards Eloise’s room where the witch waited for them. Or where they were still talking to Eloise, discovering what she had done and designing an escape. Dean wasn’t sure had much time had passed, and the Doctor still seemed pretty mad at him to ask him. Or maybe he was too concentrated beeping at the panels with his sonic thingy so they could walk through and then deactivating all the cameras they found on the way.

“It’s strange we didn’t hear any of that battle when we were in the central room,” Hermione commented, as if the silence made her too nervous to keep it. “Maybe the place is soundproof. And what do you say about all the Cybermen out there? We thought they were defectives, but maybe they were failed experiments. I imagine if magic and technology were to combine in this way, there’s bound to be some mishappnes…”

Dean hushed her. Hermione looked at him offended, but went completely quiet when she heard it too.

A mechanical stomping was coming from somewhere ahead them. They all halted at the same time. There was nowhere to run, so they raised their weapons and prepared for attack. Dean felt the tension and the tiredness of the night weighing down on his shoulders, but he was prepared to fight, if only to give Hermione and the Doctor a running chance.

The Cyberman that came down the hall stopped in its tracks upon detecting them, tilted his head as if he was analyzing them… and then continued on its way like nothing had happened.

“Well, that was weird,” the Doctor commented.

“Maybe they didn’t register that we’re here because we’re already here,” Dean commented. “So we’re supposed to be here, therefore it’s not weird.”

“What?” Hermione asked, but the Doctor nodded like that was the most logical thing in the world.

“That means that when we reach Eloise’s door, they will detect that we’re not where we’re supposed to be,” he said. “And that’s when things are going to get hairy. And with ‘hairy’, I mean ‘murder-y’ and ‘explodabl-y’.”

“Yeah, we got that,” Dean sighed.

“On the way, then!” the Doctor said. “We don’t want to be late!”

By the time that Dean was thinking he wouldn’t be able to stand any other time-related pun, they reached the door they had been pushed through the first time. The Doctor pointed his screwdriver at the panel, and after a few seconds, it opened up for them.

“Well,” he said, making the sonic disappear inside his jacket pocket. “That was fun. Ready to go, Eloise?”

Eloise looked at him with confusion, like she had not expected him to actually come back.

“But… but you were…”

“Eloise, at the risk of sounding redundant, time is of the essence here,” the Doctor insisted. “You need to come with us now.”

Eloise hesitated on the doorway. Dean couldn’t say he blamed her. Not long ago (Dean didn’t even bother trying to calculate how far back), the Doctor was all righteous and angry about what she had done. Now he was being almost friendly to her. Even for someone as unbalanced as Eloise was that had to seem suspicious. He tried to exchange a look with Hermione, but the witch was too busy keeping an eye on the hallway, probably expecting more Cybers coming their way.

In the end, Eloise stepped outside. Her eyes were cautious when she glanced over the Doctor, but slowly, her lips twisted into a shy smile.

“Very well,” she said. “Let’s go.”


	9. Best Laid Plans

They didn't go directly towards the exit. The Doctor said that was what they were expecting them to do, so it’d be dangerous and stupid to try and get out that way. It sounded perfectly logical. He then proposed an alternative: walking down clock-like hallways, deactivating the cameras and looking for another way out that might not even exist. That seemed a lot less logical, but in the two seconds after he’d said it, no one was able to come back with a better plan, so they went with it.

Eloise, who seemed to have some memories of that place, though vague, led the way, with the Doctor following closely to use his sonic screwdriver on every screen or camera they encountered. Hermione and Dean covered their backs. He still had his gun with him and held him up every time they turn around a corner or heard something behind them, even though they all knew the bullets would just ricochet on the metal the Cybers were made of. Still, Hermione figured he needed some sort of psychological support to not feel completely useless.

The thought reminded her of what he said while they were on the junkyard. He was willing to sacrifice his life to let Hermione and the Doctor have a go at the Cybers. It was noble, but also sort of stupid. Dean was brave and smart, and his family would probably miss him dearly. If he died, Hermione didn’t think any amount of fixing timelines and coxing Eloise out would bring him back. There were no do overs for death.

She looked at his profile (his clenched jaw, his determined expression), and figured she should tell him that. She should tell him not to be reckless, to trust that she was going to cover his back and that the Doctor knew what he was doing. Granted, that required more than just a small leap of faith, but she truly believed that was what they needed to get out of that predicament. Maybe to even fix what Eloise had done.

But before she could open her mouth to do that, the Doctor halted. Everyone tensed, trying to detect anything out of the ordinary. The hallway was just as deserted as it had been before, and they had not heard any more stomping since they’d escaped Eloise’s room. Hermione didn’t know whether to attribute that to an incredible stroke of luck or to the fact that the Cybermen were regrouping and preparing an ambush somewhere – she suspected the latter – but now everything seemed normal. The hallway was empty except for themselves, and silent except for the cracking static of the screens the Doctor had just disabled.

So why were they stopping?

“Is anything wrong?” Dean exteriorized what Hermione was thinking.

“Have you heard of Novikov’s self-consistency conjecture?” the Doctor asked, the way a teacher asked their students if they had read the very important book that would be discussed on that day’s lesson.

“Novi-what?” Dean asked.

“Doctor, do you really think this is the moment for that?” Hermione asked, apprehensive.

“No time like the present, my dear,” the Doctor said, and proceeded to turn around to lecture them to their faces: “It’s similar to the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, but harsher. Novikov said that paradoxes were impossible, that anything a time-traveler does only produces the circumstances they had noted before the travel. It’s a neat theory, actually.” 

“But it’s wrong,” Eloise said. “ _I_ have changed things.”

“Yes,” the Doctor nodded. “You’re not the only one, of course. I, myself, have more than a few paradoxes under my belt. It’s inevitable when you live as much as I do, but I always try and clean my mess. Still, there are certain things not even people like you and I can change, Eloise. Fix points in time nobody should even attempt to change.”

He stopped and shot an indecipherable look at the witch.

“But you have,” he continued. “And as we approach to the end of all this, I must tell you: I don’t think that’s going to end well for you.”

Eloise blinked a couple of times. Hermione didn’t know why, but she reminded her of an owl, waking up to a sudden daylight when they weren’t expecting it: disconcerted and a little annoyed. Her lips twitched, it was hard to tell if it was with anger or if she was about to smile with scorn at the Doctor’s warning. Her fist hanged onto her wand with a little more force than it was necessary.

“You don’t know everything,” she muttered. And that’s when Hermione knew what she was really feeling: she was scared. Scared to see what she had done; scared of the consequences it could have. But not for anybody else. Scared for what the consequences would be _for her_.

The Doctor didn’t answer, just stared at her with sadness so infinite that it didn’t match at all with his juvenile aspect.

“Well, that was unexpectedly dark,” Dean commented. “Can we move on now before a freaking robot shows up to pulverize us?”

“Yes, pulverization is bad,” the Doctor said, recovering his cheerful tone. “We must avoid that at all costs.”

He raised his sonic screwdriver and turned around a corner, seemingly at random.

“Hey, where exactly are we going?” Dean asked.

Hermione was wondering the same thing. They had been walking for about fifteen minutes, although “wandering” would be a more exact definition. Eloise sometimes pointed at a place and said “Maybe we should go that way”, but the Doctor kept guiding them ahead, ignoring her completely. Hermione had the impression he had some sort of plan he hadn’t bothered to share with them.

“Have you noticed this halls are not exactly symmetrical?” the Doctor asked. “I’ve been observing it for a while. The whole place is like a big circle, with Eloise’s room in the middle.”

“Like a clock,” Hermione said. “We’ve noticed that before.”

“Two longs, three shorts, one long. I’m thinking that was designed intentionally,” the Doctor continued, as if it had been no interruption. “Perhaps even to assuage your obsession, sweet, dear Eloise. But if your room was not the control center, if it was just a cell designed to keep you captive and working, that means there is another room around here we need to find.”

“I’m not following,” Dean huffed. He was obviously tired and wanting the whole thing to end, and really, he’d always had very little patient for the Doctor’s ramblings.

But Hermione understood what he was talking about. She had been too busy waiting for the next Cybermen attack, but a part of her brain had begun to notice a patron. The Doctor had led them down a hallway, then backed down, then another hallway, all the time disabling the cameras and “looking for an exit”. But what he had been really doing was measuring the halls. Two longs, three shorter, and now they were on the third one, which was a long one again. It was clear why he had stopped there to tell Eloise his cryptic warning: it was because he already found out what he was looking for.

The three shorter hallways hid a second room within the center. Probably the most important room: the room where all the Cybermen where watching his screens go out one by one, the room where they were hauled together waiting for them. If the Doctor had led them directly towards the exit, they would have come out and stopped them. Now they were probably grouped there, waiting for them to take their next step. The Doctor had effectively cornered them, and that could either be their way of ending them all… or suicide.

“Really wish we had some wire and a lighter, because you can really work wonders with those, Dean-boy,” the Doctor continued, with a sigh. “As it is, what we have would have to suffice.”

“Doctor, what exactly are we going to do now?” Dean asked, starting to realize the same thing Hermione had.

“They’re not going to let Eloise out without putting up a fight,” the Doctor said. “And the thing is, we really do need her to get out of here if we are thinking about correcting the mistakes she’s made.”

“I haven’t made any mistakes!” Eloise protested, but the Doctor paid no mind to her.

“I’m thinking you and I should keep those Cybers distracted, Hermione,” he said. “While Dean should try and get Eloise out of this place. How does that plan sound?”

It sounded like it was going to be a suicidal mission after all, but Hermione clutched her wand and nodded.

“Wait a second,” Dean said, taking a step towards the Doctor. “You’re not sending me away. If you’re fighting them, I’m coming with you.”

“No. I don’t feel comfortable indulging your death wish,” the Doctor replied, essentially shutting down Dean’s protest. “Like you said, you’re just a human with a tiny pistol, and there’s not much you can do, but I’m not letting you get killed just so you can prove you can do as much as we do.”

Dean opened his mouth, but Hermione put a hand on his forearm. He reminded her a little bit of their friends, willing to prove they could take on anything. If he had been a wizard, he probably would have been a Gryffindor.

“Dean, you have to let us do this,” she said. “The moment they realize we’re trying to sneak Eloise out, they’re going to come after you. So it’s important that someone stays with her.”

“That’s all fine and dandy, but what happens if they get you two?” Dean argued. “I can’t travel back in time; I don’t know how to operate that box of yours. You don’t get a do over.”

“Well then, we can only hope that Navikov was right for some people,” the Doctor said. Hermione could be wrong, but he thought she saw him throwing a look in Eloise’s direction.

The witch was looking at them with a vacant expression, almost as she didn’t register that both the Doctor and Hermione were willing to risk their lives so she could get out of her imprisonment. Her gaze was lost in the distance, and her lips were moving slightly, like she was muttering things to herself while she fidgeted with her fingers as if she was making some very complicated calculations. When she realized everybody was staring at her, she tilted her head.

“You don’t stand a chance,” she said. “You’re vastly outnumbered and their weapons are far superior than you can imagine. They hadn’t killed you before because I asked them not to, but now that you’ve helped me, it’s more than likely that they’ll shoot to kill if you try and confront them directly. Even if for some miracle you manage to dispose of all the Cybermen in this base, more from around the world will fly in to cover for them. They might be on the way right now if the ones here have already sent a distress signal. There’s only one possible timeline in which we all survive this, and maybe it won’t be this one.”

“Aren’t you the woman who made the impossible possible?” the Doctor asked. His tone was mocking, but Eloise didn’t register it.

“There is, however, one possibility,” she continued. “There’s a switch that could turn off the magic that powers the Cybermen. I built it in… just in case.”

She shrugged, as if to signal it wasn’t that big of a deal, but the Doctor was staring at her with something akin to admiration.

“So you knew you’d needed it one day,” he commented.

“I knew even best laid plans sometimes fail, Doctor,” Eloise replied. “Sometimes time doesn’t want to be changed, and it will fight you every step of the way.”

The Doctor crooked an eyebrow, as if to say “Shouldn’t you have taken that as a sign?” but nodded.

“Change of plans, then,” he said. “Dean, you might come if you still want to.”

Dean smirked, the same cocky smirk Hermione had seen all those nights ago (or maybe it’d only been two nights ago) in the muggle bar.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” he said.


	10. Destruction

Finding the door to the Cybermen’s operational room was easy with the Doctor’s screwdriver. It was somewhere within the middle shortest hall, and probably heavily secured against exactly what they were about to do.

“Now, remember, we’ve left them mostly blind in there,” the Doctor said. “So they won’t exactly see us coming. However…”

“However, the moment we’re out in the open we’ll be target practice,” Dean said. “Got it.”

If he was being honest with himself (something he rarely did, and something he would do even less and less in upcoming years), Dean had to admit he was nervous. Unlike Hermione and the Doctor, he’d had months to learn what the Cybermen were capable of, and now he was going straight against them. But he held his gun up and nodded, the same way Hermione had nodded with her wand in hand.

The Doctor opened his mouth, as if he was going to give them another advice or wish them luck, but he closed it up immediately. Everything that had to be said had been said already. He raised his screwdriver once more, and pointed it at a well that looked solid enough to be just that.

For a second or two, nothing happened.

Then it all started happening at the same time.

The wall moved aside, revealing a dark room. Dean didn’t have any time to peek inside, because a several laser rays flew in their direction so fast he barely had time to grab Eloise by the shoulder and get her out of the way. Hermione dodged a couple more, and then stepped in the room while screaming: _“BOMBARDA MAXIMA!”_

The ensuing explosions once more deafened Dean, but he didn’t have time to think about it. Dragging the witch behind him, he launched himself inside the control room, and landed in a chaos of smoke and noises loud enough for him to hear. There were at least two dozen Cybermen advancing towards the door, with their arms raised to fire while they repeated “DELETE, DELETE, DELETE!” in their monotonous tone over and over again.

He dragged Eloise behind what seemed to be a flipped over desk.

“Where is it?!” he asked, he asked, shouting to make himself heard over all the noise of the battle.

“I don’t know!” Eloise replied. “It’s hard to tell with the place turned upside down like this!”

Dean would have grabbed her by the shoulders and shaken her if they weren’t in such a hurry.

The explosions continued. Hermione and the Doctor had trenched themselves behind another counter. Hermione kept making the Cybermen explode, while the Doctor pointed with his screwdriver to any that dared to come too close. There were still too many for them to move freely, and the room was big and full of control panels. The switch could be in any of them.

“DELETE!” a Cyberman said, coming towards them. It raised its arm and pointed it directly at them. “DELETE!”

Dean saw the glimmer of the light pointing directly at them, but the robot exploded before he was able to shoot them. Eloise was still pointing his want at it, tilting her head like she had not expected that to work. The dismembered arm of the Cyberman bounced on the linoleum floor, and Dean had an idea. He grabbed and started connecting and twisting all the wires together until a he saw sparkles.

“DELETE!” another Cyberman insisted, coming at them again. “DELETE!”

Dean pointed the arm at it. _It’s not going to work_ , he thought, desperate.

A laser beam so strong it almost knocked him backwards came out of the dismembered arm and hit the second Cyberman right between the hollow eyes. His head rotated in the air, and the rest of him collapsed heavily on the ground.

“Now we’re talking!” Dean shouted, satisfied. He pointed at another Cyber and shot again.

They were now attacking on two fronts, and the Cybers were clearly not expecting that, because they broke their orderly formation and started shooting alternatively to either side. Which was lucky, because if they had chosen just one, Dean was certain they wouldn’t have had a chance. As it was, Hermione and him took turns to blow them up. The smell of melted metal invaded the air, and his eyes were teary, but Dean continued to move across the room, pulling from the cables. The arm was heavy as hell, so it was hard to aim. One of his lasers ended up grazing the Doctor’s hair.

“Careful with that thing!” he screamed after dodging.

Dean would have laughed if all that smoke hadn’t been getting inside his lungs and making him cough and gasp for oxygen. Everything was covered by a grey fog now, so he barely noticed when Eloise snuck behind him towards the other end of the room.

The furthest wall across from the door was covered in screen. The ones that weren’t shutter showed nothing but noise, presumable because their feed had been screwed up by the Doctor. Eloise moved towards them and stood in front of them with her head tilted for a very long time. She stretched her hand and waved her hand over the panel.

All the Cybermen stopped at once and turned towards her. Dean, Hermione and the Doctor stopped too. The panel was moving aside, revealing a set of new buttons that weren’t there before.

“YOU DON’T HAVE AUTHORIZATION TO START THAT PROTOCOL!” the Cybermen chanted in unison. “DESIST OR YOU WILL BE DELETED!”

Eloise ignored them, and started rapidly pushing a series of buttons, following a pattern only she knew. Dean raised his arm-laser, ready to resume the fighting if any of the Cybers made a movement. But apparently, they were unable to do that: they moved their bodies around their waists, like they were executing some sort of hilarious, complicated dance, but their feet remained stuck on the floor. Ultimately, they raised their weapons at Eloise and started charging their lasers.

“DESIST!” they insisted. If it he hadn’t known better, Dean would have swear there was a note of desperation in their mechanicals, inexpressive voices. “DESIST, DESIST, DE…”

Eloise pushed one last button. All at once, the Cybermen put their arms down and stood in a very rigid position.

“EXPECTING INSTRUCTIONS,” they said.

Eloise looked at them with supreme indifference, them down at her wand, and then back up at her rescuers.

“What do you think, Doctor?” she asked. “Now I can order them to do whatever I like. Even self-destruct.”

“That’s completely unnecessary,” the Doctor said. “You’ve stopped them, and that’s more than enough. Now we can leave.”

If somebody had asked Dean’s opinion, he would have said to not take any chances and blow the suckers up. But there was something in Eloise’s face, something vacant in his eyes that he didn’t like.

“Of course, there are more of them coming, and _those_ aren’t under my control,” she kept saying, but it didn’t look like she was talking with them anymore. More like she was thinking out loud about what she could or couldn’t do with those Cybers now. “I could make a stand here, pit them against each other…”

Nobody had asked Dean’s opinion about that either, but he felt compelled to give it anyway:

“Maybe we should, I don’t know, not be here when that happens?”

“I agree,” said Hermione.

“A most sensible suggestion,” said the Doctor. However, he remained just where he was. “Come with us, Eloise. If you stay here, they will know you betrayed them for sure and this time they’ll build you a much better prison. That is, if they let you live at all. Didn’t you want to see the world? Wasn’t that the point of all this? Don’t let your thirst for vengeance ruin that for you.”

Eloise didn’t say a word, but she seemed to agree with the Doctor, because she strode among the immobile Cybermen towards the door. Dean followed her, still holding onto the dismembered arm just in case. Just as when he thought they were going to leave that place without any more problems, Eloise turned towards the Cybers again. When she spoke again, her voice was hoarse, but decided.

“Initiate protocol of self-destruction. Now.”

“SELF-DESTRUCTION INITATED,” the Cybermen replied. “SELF-DESTRUCTION TO HAPPEN IN THIRTY SECONDS… TWENTY-NINE SECONDS…”

“No!” the Doctor grabbed Eloise by the arm. “Why would you do that?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Eloise shrugged. “And now, Doctor, I suggest we do as you said and leave.”

Dean didn’t have to be told twice. In an impulse, he grabbed Hermione’s arm and she raised her wand once more, but there was really nothing left to do for them but run. They turned around the hallway, and Eloise passed them by, so all they had to do was follow her black, unwashed hair towards the exit.

The Doctor was the last to arrive, and after a couple of seconds of beeping, the door opened for them, and they stepped out into the junkyard…

… just in time to see the dome’s ceiling fly into the air. At this point, Dean had become desensitize to explosions fucking up his ears, but the wave that followed still knocked him off his feet and landed him on a mountain of Cybermen discarded parts. His bones vibrated and his head spun around for a second or two. When he could lift his head, he felt a metallic taste in his mouth and realized his lips were busted.

Hermione had landed nearby, and she didn’t have a better aspect. She was rubbing the left side of her face, and her jeans were ripped around the knees.

The Doctor and Eloise were still standing. The first one stared at the witch with an unreadable expression, while Eloise looked at the flames rising up towards the sky with a wide grin in her face.

“You didn’t have to do that,” the Doctor repeated, this time lower.

“No,” Eloise agreed. “But I wanted to.”

She then turned around and stalked away from the place that had been her prison for so long.

“Are you okay?” Dean asked, offering Hermione a hand to help her stand up.

“Yeah,” Hermione muttered, looking in the direction Eloise had left. “Oh, Dean, I think we’ve made a terrible mistake.”

She didn’t have to explain what she was talking about and Dean didn’t say it out loud, but he knew they were both thinking the same thing: Eloise was out of her mind and extremely dangerous. Mad with power, maybe, but she still continued to be brilliant. She had pretty literally manipulated them into finding a way for her to destroy her former allies. That wasn’t someone Dean wanted running around in the world, much less across the history of humankind.

“What do we do now?” he asked, to no one in particular.

The Doctor answered with the most logical course of action.

“Now we take her back to her time,” he said. “And hope that will be enough.”

Dean was pretty sure it wouldn’t be, but he didn’t want to suggest they should just kill the witch. He had a feeling neither the Doctor nor Hermione would take that very well.

But if the chance presented itself…

He felt the inside of his pocket. The weight of his gun was a consoling presence.


	11. Self-consistency

They found Eloise standing in front of the TARDIS, with the same curious and fascinated expression she’d had inside her room when revealing the glass case. Hermione couldn’t help but to wonder what exactly had happened to the ever-changing substance it had inside. Maybe it was lost in the explosion? Maybe it had made everything even more unstable and whatever happened now would be on them for not taking it out with them when they left? 

She couldn’t know. All she knew was that she didn’t like the way Eloise was smiling at them.

“Shall we then?” she asked.

The Doctor snapped his fingers and the TARDIS’ doors opened up. Eloise stepped inside. They could hear her gasps of surprise and when they followed her, they found her twirling around in the control room like a little girl in a toy shop.

“What does that do?” she asked pointing at the buttons and levers that glimmered under the soft light.

“There’ll be time to show you everything,” the Doctor said, but Eloise answered with just a dissonant laughter. She took her wand out and casually waved it on the Doctor’s face.

“Doctor, please,” she said. “Don’t insult my intelligence. I know you don’t trust me.”

Through the corner of her eye, Hermione saw Deam reaching inside his pocket for the gun, but that wasn’t going to work. If Eloise was fast enough, she could stop the bullet without much trouble.

“Eloise, there’s no need for that,” she said, trying to reason with her. “The Doctor brought you all this way, didn’t he? He really wants you to travel with him. We just need to set a destination first, isn’t that right, Doctor?”

“I have to admit, I do not like the behavior you displayed back there in the Dome,” the Doctor replied. “But I do believe you’re a very smart woman, Eloise. I know that if you can convince me to help you out on what you’re planning to do, you will.”

Eloise’s eyes lit up. Hermione was beginning to understand that the best way to get through to her was just praise her a lot. And now she was inside the TARDIS, they could take her back to her time. But that wouldn’t stop her from trying to start everything she’d done all over again, would it? They needed to get her to stop. Hermione’s brain was working full steam, but nothing seemed to be coming to her.

But short of killing her, there was not much they could really do.

“Oh, Doctor, I’m so glad to hear that,” she said, with an enormous grin extending towards her face. “Why don’t you come here and show me how this all works so we can start?”

The Doctor tripped on the stairs to the console, but Dean managed to catch it in time. Hermione frowned, but didn’t say a word. Eloise was watching them all attentively, her long, thin fingers clutching her wand menacingly until the Doctor reached where she was standing. In that moment, she casually started tapping it against her palm, like an impatient school teacher waiting for the student to begin the lesson. The tip was pointing at the Doctor, and the greasy smile in her face remained.

“Well?”

“Where and when you want to go?” the Doctor asked, slowly and deliberately pushing a button.

The TARDIS’ doors shut behind them. Hermione climbed the stairs to stand in the platform, just in case the other witch did something suspicious. Dean, however, stayed near the door, like he wanted nothing to do with all the tension going on up there.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Eloise shrugged. “Surprise me.”

The Doctor pulled a lever down. The wheezing sound of the ship taking off invaded the air.

Eloise raised her wand a little.

“ _Accio Time Turner!”_

Hermione was already muttering a Stunning Spell… when she realized nothing had happened.

It was the Doctor’s turn to smile.

“I’m sorry,” he said in his most innocent tone of voice. “What exactly were you expecting to happen here?”

And then the way he stumbled against Dean made perfect sense.

“Hey, witch!” the hunter shouted. “Is this what you were looking for?”

The Time Turner dangled from his close fists.

Eloise’s face deformed into a grimace of rage. Before she could point her wand at Dean, Hermione cried out:

_“Expelliarmus!”_

Eloise’s wand flew across the air, but the witch didn’t seem to mind. She jumped the three steps and launched herself at Dean, her hands curving like claws looking for his neck. While trying to get away, the Time Turner slipped from Dean’s grasp and fell to the floor.

The crash of broken glass was followed by a sudden shake that only became more violent as the Doctor ran around the console with a concerned expression.

“Time magic!” he screamed. “It’s making the TARDIS unstable! We can’t navigate the Vortex…!”

Eloise didn’t care for all that. She was on her knees, desperately trying to grab what the glasses with her fingers. She cut herself and howled in pain, but she continued trying to assemble all the little pieces, like an impossible jigsaw puzzle she could never resolve.

Hermione saw the doors behind Eloise.

And a terrible idea crossed her mind.

“Dean!” she shouted. “Hold on to something!”

She didn’t have to say it, because Dean’s hands were already around the stairs railing, his knuckles white from how tight his grip was. Hermione pointed to the doors with her wand, her knees shaking from the brusque movements of the ship and for the atrocity what she was about to commit.

 _"Alohomora!"_ she cried out _._

The TARDIS doors opened with a deafening blow.

The hurricane winds of the Time Vortex blew inside of the ship. The Doctor was screaming, but Hermione couldn't hear what he was saying, too busy trying to hold onto the console to keep from being suck out.

Eloise wasn't so lucky. Taken by surprise, she made a sound that was part a horrified scream, part an enraged roar. Her body was dragged towards the Vortex, like she wasn't heavier than a rag doll. She held onto the edge of the door for one terrifying moment...

And then she was sucked outside.

The doors shut again, with a thump. Dean raised his head; both eyes wide open in shock. For a moment, everything remained calm.

The TARDIS shook once more, even more violently than before. Hermione fell down heavily on one, and Dean held onto the rank even tighter. Everything was spinning around them, upside down and to the sides to the point where Hermione didn't know anymore what was left or right, up or down. Her stomach flipped and her heart beat in his throat violently. The last thing she saw before closing her eyes in terror was the Doctor, running around the console, keeping his balance almost miraculously.

There was a loud thud, one last shake, and then everything stopped.

Hermione opened one eye. Dean lifted his head. He was pale and clearly trying to control his nausea.

The Doctor was still standing, though his hair was standing on end and his coat was smoking, for some reason.

"I think we landed," he said.

Hermione stood up on trembling legs. She didn't want to ask where or when they had landed. The Doctor grabbed her by the shoulder and helped her climbed down the steps. He offered his other hand to Dean. It took him two attempts before he could stand up straight.

"Let's take a look," the Doctor said. And he guided them towards the exit.

The world outside seemed... normal.

The night was starry and warm. There were crickets singing somewhere. They were in some sort of parking lot, but there not destroyed buildings, no sudden fires, no Cybermen overrunning the streets. In fact, the building in front of them - some sort of bar - was pretty illuminated and noisy.

Hermione remembered.

"Dean," she said. "This is the place where we met. The one the Cybers blew up."

Dean was apparently still trying to not like his guts out, but he looked around, and without a second hesitation, he strode towards the bar's parking lot.

"Baby!" he exclaimed upon seeing his car. "You're here! I’m never leaving you again!"

He seemed to be a second away from trying to hug it, so Hermione looked away to give him some privacy.

Two guys came out of the bar, holding onto each other and singing out loud, clearly not all that sober.

"Excuse me," Hermione called them. "What day is today?"

“The hell do I know?” asked one of the guys. “Friday? Saturday?”

“It’s June,” his friend added.

“June, 1999?” Hermione insisted.

“Unless you’ve got a time machine, Queen Victoria,” the first guy said. He and his friend burst out laughing before staggering away.

“We came back,” Hermione muttered, mesmerized.

“But what about the Cybers?” Dean asked. He had finally seemed to recover his spirits. “What happened to Eloise?”

At least that Hermione could answer. She open her bag (it was amazing that it had survived all that kerfuffle) and took the book she had taken from the library. She opened it over the Impala’s boot.

The page that talked about Libatious Cornwell had changed. Instead of “the disappearance of Eloise Mintumble”, it spoke about how she had been trapped in the year 1402 for a period of five days before the Unspeakables who were performing the experiments were able to retrieve her. However, her body had been irreparably damaged: she had aged five centuries, and subsequently died.

Hermione closed the book, unable to keep reading.

“Well, that explains it,” the Doctor said, in what she thought was an inappropriately cheery tone. “Sending her back in time aborted the time line she had created. The changes she made, the Cybermen taking over the world… it never happened.”

“But it did happen,” Dean argued. “We were there. I _remember_ being there.”

“It’s best not to think too much about it,” the Doctor recommended. “Time has a way to fix itself.”

“Self-consistency,” Hermione muttered.

“Yes, exactly,” the Doctor said, right before noticing her face. “What is it? Are you sick?”

Hermione certainly felt sick. What the TARDIS crash-land hadn’t managed, that story did: her stomach was tied up in knots, and she felt the bile in her throat.

Luckily for her, she didn’t have to explain what was wrong with her. Dean put a hand on her shoulder.

“Hey, you did what you had to,” he said. “Eloise was insane. She would have done it all over again and worse than before.”

“Maybe,” Hermione said. “But I still don’t think she deserved what I did to her. I didn’t even think about it. I just… acted. No, that’s a lie,” she admitted. “I did think about it, and I made a call.”

Dean ran out of words to say, but the Doctor hadn’t.

“Listen,” he said, standing right in front. “You had two options: to let Eloise live so she could keep on plotting, or to do something to stop her. They were both bad. And sometimes the only options we have are the bad ones, but we still have to choose. And you were brave enough to do it.”

She knew he was right. She still felt terrible, and she imagined she would continue to feel like that for a while. But she knew she’d eventually come to accept the consolation the Doctor was offering her. Just like she’d come to accept so many things.

So she took a deep breath, and forced a smile out for the Doctor. She wasn’t alright right now, but she eventually would be. In time.

“Excellent!” the Doctor clapped his hands. “So, who wants to see those fireworks now?”


	12. Full Circle

It turned out, when you had a flying time machine that you could park pretty much anywhere, finding a good seat to a firework show was pretty easy. Even if it was Sydney, and even if the fireworks were to welcome the new millennia.

“This is insane,” Hermione said, and Dean couldn’t agree more.

After everything they had gone through (he couldn’t know how long ago because his watch had stopped, but it was merely hours if his hunger and tiredness was anything to go by), it seemed almost surreal to be sitting atop of a building in freaking Australia, on New Year’s Eve. Which, in his biological time, wouldn’t happen for another six months.

Dean had been reluctant to climb into the TARDIS again. In the end, it hadn’t been any of the Doctor’s arguments that convinced him (“Once in a lifetime, Dean, you won’t live to see another millennia arrive… well, if everything goes right for you, I guess you will live to see it twice, but that’s not really the point”), but Hermione’s face. The girl might have been a witch and just straight up murdered someone, but when pushed had come to shove, she’d had his back, and hadn’t run from the fight. In his book, that made her one of the good guys. And it was obvious that she was still pretty shaken from what happened, and he didn’t think some inspirational speech and a couple of pretty lights in the sky would be enough to help her snap out of it.

So he’d swallowed his fear and followed them inside the TARDIS, swearing to himself that from that day on, he was going to stick to his own damn timeline, came hell or high water. And that’s why they were sitting side by side and watching the outline of the Sydney Opera House in the distance and the people gathered around it, who looked like a crowd of ants from that height. The Doctor was inside the TARDIS, looking for champagne and some glasses (Dean was not all that shocked to find out there was a cellar in there somewhere. There was probably a swimming pool, too), so for now, everything was quietness and calm while they waited for 1999 to end.

“So what are you going to do now?” Hermione asked. “Once the Doctor takes us back, I mean.”

“I’ll go check on my brother,” Dean said. “I know we fixed the stupid timeline and he’s alright now, but I still won’t believe it until I see the little brat.”

“You must be really close,” Hermione said.

“Yeah,” Dean sighed. He went quiet for a while and then he decided what the hell? He was probably never going to see Hermione again, so he might as well tell her a secret. “You know why I wasn’t with him and my dad when all this crap went down? Because I took off on my own. My dad’s going to be so pissed when I finally roll back and return his car.”

He laughed, but Hermione didn’t. She stared at him with preoccupation in her eyes.

“It’s nothing, really,” Dean shrugged. “It’s just that next year… or this year, Sam is starting his senior year in high school. In this life, we move around a lot, and he just wanted us to settle down somewhere for the semester so he could finish school without so many interruptions, but my dad wouldn’t hear about. They had a terrible fight, but they have terrible fights every other day. It’s kind of exhausting. So I walked out on them. Thought I’d go to a bar, meet some cute girl and be back in a couple of days when the tension had defused.”

“That’s why you spent all that time looking for them when the Cybers took over,” Hermione guessed.

“I would have looked for them even if I wasn’t feeling so damn guilty,” Dean tried to laugh. “But no, yeah, that was part of it.”

He stayed in silence for a very long time, thinking if he should add what he was thinking now. But he had already confessed one part, so he wasn’t about to half-ass it.

“I don’t know, sometimes I see this look in his face,” he said. “Like he’s done with everything. Like he just wants to leave it all behind.”

“You’re afraid he would walk away from,” Hermione said.

And just hearing her vocalizing Dean’s fears made him immediately retreat behind his wall of denial.

“Nah, he would never do that,” he said, with a confidence he didn’t feel. “It’s just hormones, you know? It’s a phase. He’ll grow out of it. He would never abandon his family. That is not what we Winchesters do.”

“Oh,” said a voice behind them. They turned around to see the Doctor standing there, with three champagne glasses in his hand and a bottle. “Your last name is Winchester? You’re Dean Winchester?”

“Well, yeah,” Dean shrugged. “Aren’t you old as all hell and know everything?”

“I know many things,” the Doctor replied, obviously stung by Dean’s mockery. “I just didn’t realize you… were you.”

“And no one in the world I’d rather be,” Dean replied with his cocky smile. He moved aside to give the alien some room between them.

The Doctor sat down, passed the glasses and poured the champagne, but he didn’t look as cheerful as before. He was pensive and serious.

“Well,” he said, shaking his head. “I guess tonight’s the night to put aside all of our worries…”

“I think Ron wants to break up with me,” Hermione let out, and then gulped down the content of her glass under the mesmerized looks of her adventure partners. “Oh, it’s nothing specific,” she added, as if they had asked her to elaborate. (Dean figured since she’d lent him an ear, he might as well do the same). “Just this feeling I get. He hasn’t written me a word since I left. I keep getting letters from his sister, but not a peep from him. Maybe he’s mad at me because I decided to travel without him.”

“Well, he’s an idiot if he thinks like that,” Dean commented, bluntly.

“Oh, I know that,” Hermione agreed. “But he is _my_ idiot, you know?”

She tended her glass to the Doctor for a refill, and he hastily obliged.

“Well, what about you, Doctor?” Hermione asked. “What personal issues were you running from on a clear summer night in 1999?”

“I never run for my problems,” the Doctor replied. “I just make it a little harder for them to get to me.”

Both Hermione and Dean glanced at him with skepticism. The Doctor sighed.

“There’s a trip to the Singing Towers of Darillium I’ve been postponing,” he confessed. “My wife keeps pressuring me to go.”

“You have a wife?” Dean asked. “Of course you have a wife,” he added, because logic didn’t apply the same way in the Doctor’s world as it did in his. Still, he couldn’t fathom the kind of woman that would marry that mad little man with his ridiculous bowtie. Also, he didn’t want to ask what the Singing Towers of Dari-whatever were.

“Well, I won’t have her for long,” the Doctor added, bitterly. “It’s the downside of time travel. Sometimes you can’t avoid the spoilers.”

The three of them stayed in commiserated silence for a second, and then Dean giggled softly.

“Killer robots and mad witches are no big deal,” he explained when the others stared at him in confusion. “But God save us from interpersonal relationships.”

Hermione was the first to laugh out loud, and the Doctor promptly followed, a second before he exclaimed:

“Oh, it’s starting!”

A single, solitaire flame flew up in the sky and exploded in thousands of little sparks across the sky. More and more followed, until everything was illuminated in golden and red, green and blue. It went on and on for several minutes, and just when they started to think it was finishing, another firework came to continue the spectacle. The rooftop where they were sitting was silent as the three of them just contemplated the lights with unbridled fascination.

“Turn of the millennia!” exclaimed the Doctor. “I have to tell you, this is totally one of my favorites. This is when humanity starts to become the race that conquered the stars, the race that expanded far and wide across the universe and endured when so many others did not. And without any time-travelling tricks. Isn’t it amazing?”

“It’s quite humbling, Doc,” Dean mumbled. He lived day to day, surviving against the dangers that he encountered. He couldn’t even picture the things the Doctor was predicting. But if he said them, he assumed they were going to become true.

“Would you like to see it?” the Doctor asked. “Not all of it. Just a little peek here and there. And you would have to leave your gun out, of course,” the Doctor added, pointing at Dean with his glass.

Dean considered asking if they could pick Sam up before, because that was something the nerd would totally love to see. Then he realized his father would never forgive him if the both of them disappeared like that.

Hermione seemed to be thinking something similar, because after a few seconds she sighed and shook her head.

“I’ve been away from home for too long,” she said. She stayed in silence one moment and then added: “But could you give me a lift?”

 

* * *

 

It was early in the morning when the TARDIS landed in the road in front of Burrow. The sun was barely shinning in the sky and nothing was moving in miles around. Not even the chickens or the garden gnomes were making a fuss, as they did sometimes. In fact, everything was quiet right before the ship’s door burst open and a young witch with bushy brown hair came out of it running as fast as her legs could take her. She practically jumped the fence, and just as she expected, she found the door open and welcoming her.

“Hello?” Hermione called, as she slipped inside the house. “Good morning! Is anybody here?”

That was strange. Not even Mrs. Weasley was awake making everyone breakfast, or Mr. Weasley reading the _Daily Prophet_ in his favorite chair. Everything was so silent, that for a moment Hermione got scared. What if they hadn’t fixed the timeline after all? What if something terrible had happened to all of them while she was gone? What if…?

There were some steps in the stairs.

“Hermione?” Harry called, rubbing his eyes before putting on his glasses. His hair was as messy as usual, and he still had his pajama pants on. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to come back in two weeks?”

Hermione was so excited to see him that she didn’t even bother to ask. She jumped the steps that separated them and threw her arms around his neck.

“Oh, I’ve missed you!” she exclaimed.

“What’s going?” Ginny’s voice came floating from above, and she too appeared on the stairs with a confused expression that soon turned into joy. “You’re back!”

“Yes!” Hermione cried as she ran up to hug her too. “Oh, yes, I’m back! And you’re alright!”

“Okay, you’re choking me a little here,” Ginny complained, and Hermione let her go with an awkward chuckle. “And what’s that ‘you’re alright’ nonsense? Of course we’re alright. Why wouldn’t we be?”

Hermione didn’t even know how to start answering that question.

“Is Ron here?”

Ginny showed her a knowing smirk. “Yeah, he’s in his room. Don’t let mom see you!” she warned her as Hermione passed her by, rapid as a Firebolt.

She was breathless and red-faced by the time she reached the top of the flight of stairs, but she didn’t care. Also, she had probably woken the entire Burrow up, making as much noise as the ghouls, but she also didn’t care. She was just ecstatic, and when she stopped to take a breath and watched Ron’s door opened, she became even more ecstatic to see him there, with his red hair almost as messy as Harry’s, his pajama and his slippers. He was rubbing his eyes and protesting:

“Oy, Ginny! What is it with you…?”

He froze when he realized the person at the other end of the hall wasn’t his sister. He blinked several times, and for a moment, Hermione thought he was going to look disappointed.

But then the widest smile spread across his face.

“You’re back!”

And all the doubts Hermione had been harboring since she left disappeared without a trace.

She practically tackled Ron, but he managed to catch her and hold her tight against his chest. Hermione kissed him on the cheek, and on the tip of the nose, but he stopped her when she tried to kiss him on the lips.

“Morning breath,” he explained with embarrassment.

“Oh, you’re such an idiot, Ron Weasley,” Hermione laughed, but she hid her face against his neck and breathed in deeply. He was _her_ idiot, and that was all that mattered.

“Why are you back so soon?” Ron asked.

That was a complicated question, and Hermione decided she felt too happy to even attempt answer it.

“Why didn’t you write me?” she asked instead.

Ron looked down at his slippers for a moment.

“I’m sorry, I know I should have,” he said. “I started several letter, but I couldn’t get around sending them. You sounded like you were having so much fun I didn’t want to interrupt. I mean, I know you like writing long letters, and I didn’t want you to have to miss an excursion to answer me…”

Hermione didn’t know whether to slap him or kiss him, so she simply hugged him again.

“Well, I missed you lots,” she concluded.

“Me too,” he replied.

Hermione was about to suggest they should go into his room so he could read him all of those letters, but a loud, wheezing sound coming in through the window interrupted them. Ron’s face got all scrunched up in confusion when he looked outside and saw the blue phone box that was beginning to vanish in thin air.

“What the bloody hell was that?” he asked.

“I… made some new interesting friends,” Hermione shrugged. And she burst out laughing at her boyfriend’s face.

 

* * *

 

 

On the other side of the world, the TARDIS was appearing in a parking lot, in a summer night in 1999, not even five minutes after it had left that same place. Dean opened the doors and sighed in relief.

“Well, Doc,” he said. “I’d say it was fun, but I’d be lying.”

“Absolutely,” the Doctor nodded, comprehensively. “And I’d say I hope to see you again someday, but I’d also be lying. Lay off the firearms, boy.”

Dean made a pistol gesture with his hand (just because he knew it’d piss him off) and took a step outside.

“Dean,” the Doctor called him. When Dean turned to look at him, he seemed concerned. “There’s something… perhaps I shouldn’t tell you, but… you and your brother…”

“Stop,” Dean cut him off. “Is this one of those fixed things that I can’t change even if I try?”

“Probably,” the Doctor said. “Yes,” he admitted in the end.

“Then I don’t want to know,” Dean shrugged. “Whatever happens to Sam and me… we’ll cross that bridge when get to it.”

The Doctor opened his mouth, perhaps to protest, but in the end he just shook his head.

“Perhaps you’re wiser than I thought, Dean Winchester,” he said. “Take care.”

“Yeah, you too,” Dean said, although he felt a little ridiculous telling that to a freaking madman with a time-travelling box. “And say hi to the missus for me.”

He got out of the box before the Doctor could add anything else. In two strides, he was standing next to his car. It was amazing that after everything he’d gone through, the keys were still in his pocket. One of the many things he simply couldn’t explain.

The wheezing noise behind him distracted him. For a moment he thought to just get in the car and forget all about the madness that was the Doctor’s world, but in the end, he stood right where he was while the TARDIS became transparant and finally disappeared.

Like it had never been there at all.

Dean wondered if perhaps he should have listened to what the Doctor had to say, if it would prepare him better for what was to come, but in the end he decided he had done the right thing. Eloise had tried to change the future, and had almost broken the world in the process. If there was a lesson there, it was that it was useless to fight against time.

Smiling to himself (and already imagining the berating he would have to endure for taking Baby without permission), he got inside the Impala and drove away.


End file.
